Martyn’s Law for Conference Centres: What You Need to Do
TL;DR
Conference centres with 200 to 799 people on site at once (delegates, speakers, crew, organiser staff, and your own team) fall under Martyn’s Law standard tier. Above 800 you’re into enhanced tier instead. Your particular difficulty is the opposite of an exhibition hall’s: instead of one open space, your people are scattered across breakout rooms behind closed doors, with the lights down and someone else’s sound system running. An announcement that carries across a hall won’t reach them. Your peak isn’t the keynote either, it’s the coffee break, when every room empties into one foyer. Below: counting, the reach problem, and a worked example.
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Most conference centres already run on paperwork: an event sheet per booking, a named organiser contact, a fire procedure the licence depends on, and someone from your team walking the floor. Martyn’s Law adds what those don’t usually cover: keeping delegates inside when the danger is outside, securing entrances that stand open during registration, and a way of telling every room what’s happening that doesn’t rely on the fire alarm or the organiser’s AV.
Exhibition venues worry about one enormous open room. Conference centres have the reverse problem: the people you need to reach are spread through a building, and no single announcement gets to all of them. Solving that is the hardest part of this for a conference centre, and it’s worth doing before you write anything else down. If you also run trade shows and exhibitions, the exhibition venues guide covers the open-hall side of the job. The rest of this guide starts with the number everything else hangs off.
Does Martyn's Law Apply to Conference Centres?
Yes. Conference Centres fall under Halls etc. (Schedule 1, paragraph 6) of the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, which applies once 200 or more people, including staff, volunteers, and contractors, are regularly expected on site at the same time. If your conference centre expects between 200 and 799 people at once, it qualifies as a standard tier premises. At 800 or more, you're into enhanced tier instead, which carries a heavier set of duties.
Standard tier means two duties: notify the SIA that you are a qualifying premises, and put public protection procedures in place covering evacuation, invacuation, lockdown, and communication.
No physical alterations. No equipment to buy. No consultants to hire.
How to Work Out Your Conference centre Capacity
Count delegates, speakers, AV and production crew, the organiser’s staff, sponsors staffing small stands, catering teams, and your own staff and volunteers. If you scan badges on arrival, you have a live number most venue types would envy. Use it, but remember it misses everyone who never gets a badge, which is usually the crew and the caterers.
The coffee break is your peak, not the keynote. During sessions your people are spread across the building; at eleven o’clock every room empties into one foyer at the same time. That fifteen minutes is the number your procedures need to work against. And it’s the moment a plan built around the auditorium quietly stops fitting.
Where you run two or three events at once, the threshold is about how many people are in the building, not how many are at the biggest booking. A training day in one suite, an AGM in another and a dinner in the evening can put you over 200 on a day when no single client is anywhere near it.
If your conference space sits inside a larger building, a hotel, a university, a council building or an arts centre, work out whose premises are whose. Where more than one person has control, each is a responsible person in their own right and the law expects them to coordinate rather than assume someone else has it in hand.
Not sure where you fall? Use our free capacity calculator to work it out.
Key Challenges for Conference Centres
Most Conference Centres hit the same handful of problems with Martyn's Law, and they come from how the building works rather than from the Act itself. These are the ones that come up most often:
People behind closed doors
A delegate in a breakout room has the door shut, the lights down, and a speaker talking through the room’s own sound system. If you have a house PA that reaches every room, test whether it can actually be heard over in-room audio, because plenty can’t. The reliable answer is a human per room: the session chair, a room steward, or the AV technician who is already sitting at the back. Give that person a way to be told, whether that’s a radio, a phone tree or a group chat, and agreed words to say when they are.
The layout changes with every booking
Theatre, cabaret, boardroom, classroom. The same room holds a different number of people and empties at a different speed depending on how you set it, and a cabaret set with eighty round tables takes noticeably longer to clear than rows facing forward. Exit routes shift with the furniture. So make a walk of the set rooms part of the sign-off before delegates arrive, the same way you’d check the AV works.
Delegates who know three places in your building
Most delegates arrived this morning, walked from reception to their room, and have since learned where the coffee is and where the toilets are. That’s the whole of their mental map. The housekeeping announcement at the start of the day is the most valuable thirty seconds you have, and it costs nothing: where the exits are, what happens if they hear an announcement, and who’s wearing what if they need to ask someone.
Hybrid sessions and live streams
If a session is being streamed or recorded, an incident in the room goes out with it. Decide in advance who kills the stream and the recording, and make sure that person is in the room rather than at head office. This matters most for lockdown: broadcasting live footage of where people are hiding, to an audience you can’t see, is the one thing you really don’t want your AV setup doing by default.
A front door that’s open to anyone
Many conference centres have a public foyer, a café, and a reception where people walk in off the street during the day. The access control is at the room, not the entrance, which is a perfectly reasonable way to run a building but does mean your lockdown procedure starts further in than you might assume. Work out which doors between the public areas and the event floors can actually be secured, and who can reach them quickly.
Worked Example: Conference centre Procedures
A city conference centre with a 300-seat auditorium, eight breakout rooms across two upper floors, a first-floor foyer used for catering and a handful of sponsor stands, a ground-floor reception with a public café, and a basement car park. Two events running at once. Peak 520.
| Procedure | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Capacity | 520 (400 delegates across two events + 40 speakers and organiser staff + 25 AV and production crew + 30 venue staff and volunteers + 25 catering) |
| Evacuation | Auditorium through its own doors to the main entrance and the side street exit; breakout floors down both stair cores, not the lifts; foyer down the main stair; kitchen and back of house through the service stair. Muster point in the square opposite, deliberately not the car park ramp, which is where the emergency services will want to be. Room stewards sweep their own room and report to the duty manager at the muster point, which is also how you find out that room six was empty because the session finished early. |
| Invacuation | The auditorium and the interior breakout rooms on the second floor have no external glazing and make the best shelter. The first-floor foyer is glazed on two sides and is the worst room in the building to be in, which is awkward because it’s where everyone is at coffee time. The move is out of the foyer and into the auditorium, which is next to it and holds the numbers. |
| Lockdown | Reception doors locked by the duty receptionist; café shutter down; car park shutter closed from the facilities office; the delivery door and the link door to the adjoining building secured by facilities. Breakout room doors closed and lights off, with stewards keeping their groups in place. Announcement to stay in the room, move away from the glass, and wait to be told. |
| Communication | House PA into every room, backed up by radios to each room steward, because the PA can be lost under in-room audio. The AV desk can interrupt sound in any room from the control position, which is the fastest route to a presenter who is mid-sentence. Agreed wording so a session chair repeats the same thing in every room rather than improvising. Duty manager coordinates with both event organisers, who each have a named contact, and calls 999. |
| Training | Venue staff at induction and again at the start of the busy season. Room stewards briefed each morning before delegates arrive: their room, their exit, their shelter area, and the words. Organisers covered at the pre-event meeting alongside the running order. AV suppliers asked directly who kills the stream. The delegate housekeeping announcement carries the rest. |
This is one example. Your procedures should reflect your specific building, layout, and circumstances. Read our full guide to public protection procedures for a detailed breakdown of what to include. To see how procedures like these come together on paper, read our complete example document for a 300-capacity pub.
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The people who make this work on the day are the room stewards, and they’re often the most casual part of your staffing. A five-minute briefing before doors is worth more than an hour in a classroom three months earlier, because it’s about this room, today.
Ask your AV supplier the stream question in writing before the event rather than during it. Who stops the broadcast, and how fast? It takes one line in the pre-event email and it’s the sort of thing nobody thinks about until it’s live.
Your permanent staff and volunteers are the constant across every booking. Everyone else, the organisers, the crew, the stewards, the caterers, cycles through. Train the constant properly and give the rest a short, specific brief.
The free ACT Awareness e-learning (45 minutes) is a good baseline for anyone who wants to go further. It covers recognising threats, suspicious items, and what to do during an attack.
Quick Checklist
- Work out your peak number at the coffee break, not during sessions, and include crew and caterers who never get a badge
- Test whether your house PA can actually be heard in a breakout room with in-room audio running
- Name a person per room (session chair, steward or AV tech) and decide how they get told
- Agree the words they say, so every room hears the same instruction
- Walk the exit routes for each room layout you sell, because cabaret and theatre sets empty differently
- Identify shelter areas without external glazing, and be honest about which spaces are glass boxes
- List every door between the public areas and the event floors, and who can secure each one
- Agree with your AV supplier who stops a live stream or recording, and how quickly
- Cover procedures at the pre-event meeting with each organiser, and put them in the hire terms
Getting Started
Compliance is not complicated. Here is what to do:
- Work out your capacity (try our free calculator). Under 200? You are not in scope.
- Write procedures for evacuation, invacuation, lockdown, and communication tailored to your conference centre.
- Make sure your staff and volunteers know the procedures. Brief them, put up posters, hand out one-page summaries.
- Keep records of what you have done and who has been briefed.
- Review at least once a year.
You can do this yourself, or use Standard Tier to document your procedures in 10 minutes, set up a training portal your staff and volunteers can access on their phones whenever it suits them, and keep a digital audit trail without chasing signatures or filing paperwork.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Does Martyn’s Law apply to my conference centre right now?
How do we reach delegates in breakout rooms during a session?
Who is the responsible person, us or the event organiser?
We occasionally host a conference with 900 delegates. Does that make us enhanced tier?
Do we need to search bags or check every delegate at the door?
Our conference suite is inside a hotel. Whose duty is it?
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Standard Tier (2026). Martyn’s Law for Conference Centres: What You Need to Do. Available at: https://www.standardtier.co.uk/guide/martyns-law-for-conference-centres
Last reviewed: 22 August 2026. Based on the Act, the Home Office statutory guidance published on 15 April 2026, and the Home Office factsheets. Requirements may be refined as the SIA finalises its guidance.
This guide is general information about the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, not legal advice. Duties under the Act rest on the responsible person for each venue and cannot be transferred. If you're unsure how a specific requirement applies to your premises, take advice from a solicitor or qualified security adviser before acting on anything you read here.
Standard Tier is an independent platform and is not affiliated with the UK Home Office, the SIA, or any government body.