Free Martyn's Law Resources: Every Government Tool, Listed

Do You Have to Pay Anything to Comply With Martyn's Law?

No. A venue expecting between 200 and 799 people has two duties under the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, and neither has a price tag. Notifying the regulator is free of charge, the guidance is free to read, and the government's counter-terrorism training is free to take.

The Home Office puts it plainly in the standard duty factsheet: compliance needs 'neither particular expertise nor the use of third-party products or services'. That is an unusually direct thing for a government to say about a new law, and it happens to be true.

We sell a paid tool, so our stake in this is obvious. We still agree with that sentence. If you have the hours, you can do all of this yourself for nothing, and the rest of this page is the list of what to use. Our quarrel is only with the implication that free means finished, which is what the last few sections are about.

One caveat before the list. All of it assumes standard tier. Above 799 you're into enhanced tier, where a written document, physical measures and a designated senior individual are all required, and the free resources stop being enough on their own. A few venue types stay standard tier at any size, including places of worship and schools. Check which tier applies first.

Home Office Guidance and Factsheets

This is the official 'what you must do' material, and it's where to start. It was published on 15 April 2026 and corrected in August 2026.

• Section 27 statutory guidance. The main document, 129 pages. Covers scope, the responsible person, and what each of the four procedure types should deal with. Thorough, and heavy going. The standard tier material is a fraction of it.
• Supplementary Document A. Six approved methods for working out how many people you expect. This is the one that decides your tier, so it's the most consequential page in the set.
• Supplementary Document B. Worked examples of premises that are and aren't in scope. Useful if your site is an odd shape: shared buildings, outdoor areas, mixed use.
• Standard duty requirements factsheet. A few pages instead of 129. If you read one thing on this list, read this.
• Myth buster (PDF). Short, and the best defence against being sold something you don't need. It confirms the SIA charges nothing and endorses no product.
• Notification requirement guidance. Published July 2026, plain English, explains what you'll have to tell the SIA and when. A standard tier venue gets three months from the day the duty starts.

There's also a Supplementary Document C, which is the Home Office's own list of further resources. If you want the government's version of this page, that's it.

The SIA, Your Regulator

The Security Industry Authority regulates Martyn's Law. Its material tells you how it intends to behave, which the Home Office guidance doesn't.

• Understanding Martyn's Law and the SIA's role. The regulator's own summary. Confirms that enforcement is expected in spring 2027, that inspections will be risk-based, and that you'd typically get 72 hours' notice of one.
• The SIA's Martyn's Law collection page. Every SIA update and guidance product in one dated list. If you only bookmark one page, bookmark this one. It's how we keep our own guides current.
• Section 12 guidance. The SIA's 'how we will regulate' document, covering inspections, enforcement and penalties. It was consulted on in 2026 and is expected autumn 2026. Not published yet, so nobody has seen the final version.

Notification itself is free and the portal isn't open. You can't notify yet, whatever anyone tells you. More on the notification duty.

ProtectUK and Counter Terrorism Policing

ProtectUK is the police-run site for protective security advice. It's free, most of it needs no account, and it's the practical counterweight to the Home Office's legal framing.

• ProtectUK Martyn's Law hub. The landing page, with a standard tier section underneath it.
• Evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and protected spaces. The most directly useful page on the site for writing procedures. It explains what a protected space needs to be, which is the bit most venues get stuck on.
• Bomb threat checklist. A printable form for whoever picks up the phone. Costs nothing, takes a minute to put by the till, and is worth doing this week.
• Run, Hide, Tell. The public advice for a weapons attack, with a short film you can play in a team meeting.

What Free Training Is Available for Staff and Volunteers?

The government's ACT and SCaN courses are free, online, and open to anyone. ACT Awareness takes about 45 minutes and is the sensible baseline for everyone who works at your venue. None of it is legally required, and there is no official Martyn's Law qualification to hold.

Everything below is in the ProtectUK e-learning catalogue, free of charge:

• ACT Awareness e-learning (about 45 minutes). Seven modules covering suspicious behaviour, suspicious items, bomb threats and what to do in an attack. The one to give everybody.
• SCaN for All Staff (about 30 minutes). Spotting someone sizing the place up, and the 'power of hello' technique for dealing with it. It pairs well with front-of-house work.
• ACT in a BOX (about 90 minutes). A tabletop exercise pack you run yourself, no facilitator needed. Good for a quiet afternoon with the team.
• ACT Security (about 75 minutes). A step up for anyone with security duties. Needs ACT Awareness first.

Free advice from an actual person exists too. Every police force has Counter Terrorism Security Advisers who give site-specific advice at no cost, and the SIA has been recruiting venues to take part in its pilot inspections. Both are worth asking about. Our ACT training guide goes through how to build these into a plan.

Free Tools From Us

These are ours, not the government's, and we've kept them in their own section so the difference is obvious. All free, no card needed.

• Scope checker. Works out whether Martyn's Law applies to your venue at all, and which tier if it does.
• Capacity calculator. Works out which tier you're in, using the Home Office assessment methods.
• Procedures document generator. Answer questions about your venue and get a draft document back.
• Example procedures document. A full worked document for a fictional 300-capacity pub, readable in the browser or as a watermarked PDF.
• Compliance checklist. Every step for standard tier, with the required items separated from the merely sensible ones.

Where You Land After Using All of It

Work through everything above and you'll have read what the law requires, established your tier, understood the four procedure types, and put your team through 45 minutes of decent counter-terrorism training. That's a real position to be in. Plenty of venues will never get past the first two.

What you won't have is anything specific to your building, or any record that it happened. Those are the two gaps, and they're the same two gaps for every venue.

Gap One: Nothing Writes the Document for Your Building

No free resource, government or otherwise, produces a procedures document for your venue. The statutory guidance describes what evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication procedures should deal with, and gives worked examples for a shop, a restaurant and a pub. Useful as a shape. It isn't your building.

Your fire exits, the room with no external windows that could serve as a safer area, which door needs a person on it in a lockdown, whether the beer garden gate bolts from the inside: none of that is in any guidance, because nobody in Whitehall has been to your premises. Working it out is the actual job, and it's the part the free material hands straight back to you.

And to be exact about the legal position, standard tier doesn't require a written document at all. Section 5 asks you to have appropriate procedures in place so far as is reasonably practicable. Nothing in it says they have to be on paper. Paper is simply how you give fifteen people the same procedure, remember it next March, and show an inspector what you decided. More on what the procedures have to cover.

Gap Two: Nothing Records Who's Been Trained

The free courses are genuinely good and they leave no trace at your venue. ACT Awareness gives a certificate to the person who took it, on their own account, in their own inbox. It tells you nothing about the other eleven people on your rota, and it says nothing about your procedures, because it's a national course that has never heard of your premises.

What the Act actually asks for is that your procedures reach the people who would have to carry them out. Free training can't do that job. A briefing on your evacuation routes is a separate piece of work from a national e-learning module, and it's the one that has to happen again every time you take on a new starter.

Standard tier carries no record-keeping duty, so nothing obliges you to log any of it. But the SIA has said it will run risk-based inspections with around 72 hours' notice from spring 2027. Three days is plenty of time to find a list. It isn't enough time to brief a team from scratch and pretend you did it in January.

How to Close Both Gaps Without Paying

You can. It's a document and a list, and neither needs software:

1. Walk the building with the four procedure types in hand and write down what happens for each. Exits and assembly point, safer area, who locks what, how the alarm is raised.
2. Put it in a document, print it, and keep a copy somewhere staff and volunteers can reach it. Behind the bar, in the office, on the noticeboard.
3. Brief everyone on it, then keep a spreadsheet with three columns: name, date briefed, date they finished ACT Awareness.
4. Add the new starter briefing to your induction checklist, so it happens without anyone having to remember to make it happen.
5. Put a reminder in the calendar to review the lot once a year, or sooner if you change the layout.

The cost of this route is your time, and the risk is drift. Spreadsheets go stale, the printed copy ends up under a pile of invoices, and the person who wrote it leaves. If your team is small and stable, that may never bite you.

Where a Paid Tool Fits

The free material covers the reading and the training, and we'd rather you used it for both. Paying starts to make sense on the recurring part: the document taking 10 minutes instead of an evening, staff and volunteers training on their phones without you booking a room, and the audit trail keeping itself while your team turns over. That's what Standard Tier does, and it's the whole of what it does.

If you'd rather do the whole thing yourself, work down the list above and skip us. Genuinely.

Frequently Asked Questions

Official Sources

• Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 statutory guidance (Home Office)
• Standard duty requirements factsheet (Home Office)
• Martyn's Law myth buster (Home Office)
• Martyn's Law and the SIA's role as regulator (collection)
• ProtectUK e-learning catalogue (Counter Terrorism Policing)
• Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 (legislation.gov.uk)

Related Guides

• See what compliance costs when you do pay for it
• Build a training plan around the free ACT courses
• Read the complete Martyn's Law compliance guide