Martyn’s Law for Events Venues: What You Need to Do

TL;DR

Events venues with 200 to 799 people in the building at once are standard tier under Martyn’s Law. That count takes in guests, your own staff and volunteers, and everyone the hirer brings: caterers, crew, security, a promoter’s door team. At 800 or more it’s enhanced tier instead. Your number is the busiest kind of booking you can expect to come round again, which for most hire venues is a standing night rather than a seated dinner. The bigger point is who carries the duty. When you hire the building out, you stay the responsible person, and at standard tier the hirer has no legal duty to co-operate with you. So the hire contract does the heavy lifting. Below: counting a venue that changes every week, what to put in the contract, briefing suppliers who’ve never seen the room, and a worked example for a 610-person promoter night.

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Schedule 1 of the Act lists “a venue for hire for events or activities” as one of the uses it covers, in the same paragraph as exhibition halls and conference centres. If your business is renting out the space, whether that’s a blank-canvas warehouse, a function suite or a converted chapel that does a product launch on Tuesday and a club night on Saturday, that’s the paragraph you sit under. The Act does have a separate entertainment category, but it only covers uses not mentioned elsewhere in the Schedule. So our reading is that a promoter’s gig in your space still falls under the hire-venue paragraph. The procedures you need are the same either way.

What sets events venues apart is that almost nothing stays put between bookings. The client changes. So do the layout, the suppliers and the crowd, and the guests have come for the client rather than for you, which means most of them have never been in the building before. The one constant is your own team. Martyn’s Law asks you to have procedures for evacuation, invacuation (moving people inside, or to a safer part of the building), lockdown and communication, and the Home Office’s statutory guidance expects the people who’d carry them out to know them. At a hire venue, a lot of those people work for somebody else on the night.

Does Martyn's Law Apply to Events Venues?

Yes. Events Venues 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, can be expected on site at the same time, even if only occasionally. If your events venue 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 Events venue Capacity

Count your busiest realistic booking, not your average one. The Act looks at how many people you can reasonably expect in the building at once “from time to time”, and the Home Office reads that as occasionally. It isn’t an average. If standing gigs or club nights fill the room to its licensed capacity a few times a year, that’s your number, even if most weeks you’re hosting a 120-cover dinner. Land between 200 and 799 and you’re standard tier. A one-off spike you couldn’t have seen coming, and don’t expect again, doesn’t count.

Count everyone in the building at the same moment, across every room in use. The Home Office’s guidance on counting says staff means everyone working at the premises, contractors and volunteers included. So the caterers, bar staff, AV and production crew, security contractors, cloakroom, cleaners, the hirer’s own team and the promoter’s door staff all go in alongside the guests. A launch sold to the client as 400 guests can easily put 470 people in the building.

There’s more than one accepted way to reach the figure. If your premises licence sets a maximum capacity, that’s the obvious starting point, and the fire safety occupancy figure is another. Tickets issued and door counts from past events make good supporting evidence. Write down which method you used and why, and look at it again whenever the layout, the licence or the kind of booking you take changes.

Watch the top end too. If you can reasonably expect 800 or more people at once even occasionally (the guidance says once a year can be enough), the whole venue is enhanced tier, which carries heavier duties than this guide covers. That’s true whether the big night is the same event every year or a different one each time. A genuine one-off of that size is treated differently, and the FAQs below cover it.

Tickets, guest lists and membership don’t take you out of scope. The Act says it’s irrelevant whether entry is limited to people who’ve paid, hold tickets, or are members or guests of a club. Ticketed nights, markets, fairs and open launches sit squarely inside the Act. A venue that only ever takes private, invite-only bookings is a less settled question, and there’s more on that in the FAQs.

Not sure where you fall? Use our free capacity calculator to work it out.

Key Challenges for Events Venues

Most Events Venues 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:

You stay responsible for every hire

The duty sits with whoever controls the premises, and the statutory guidance is clear that hiring the building out doesn’t change who that is: “the responsible person remains the same.” It’s you whether you’re hosting a charity dinner or handing a promoter the room for the night. You can ask a hirer to carry out parts of your procedures, and the guidance expects you to explain the legal requirements to them and what you need from them. What you can’t do is hand over the legal responsibility. The one exception is a large public qualifying event, covered in the FAQs.

The hirer has no duty to help you, unless the contract says so

The Act does make people with some control over premises co-operate with the responsible person, but only where the premises are enhanced tier or the event is a qualifying event. For a normal hire at a 200 to 799 venue, nothing in the Act obliges the hirer to do anything for you. That’s why the hire agreement matters so much. The guidance suggests putting the requirements in the contract to hire, much as venues already do for health and safety and fire safety. It also says that, if the SIA asks, the responsible person “must be able to demonstrate that they clearly specified the requirements to the hirer and took reasonable actions to ensure that the hirer complied with these requirements”. So you need two things. Clauses that say what the hirer has to do, and some way of checking on the night that they did it.

A different room every booking

Seated dinner on Thursday, theatre-style talk on Friday, standing gig on Saturday, a market with forty stalls on Sunday. Each layout moves where the crowd sits, which exits are nearest and where people could shelter. Stages, bars, photo walls and stall rows end up across an escape route more often than anyone likes to admit. Write the core procedures once for the building, then keep a short version for each layout you use often. And walk the exits after every build, before doors, because the plan the client signed off and the room their production team built aren’t always the same thing.

Suppliers who’ve never worked the room

On a big night, the people nearest the exits might be an external caterer’s waiting staff, a hired AV crew, a security company you didn’t choose and a promoter’s door team who arrived at six. Many of them won’t have worked in your building before. The statutory guidance expects the people with a part to play in your procedures to know them and their role, whoever employs them. It also says that door staff with SIA licences are still likely to need instruction on the specific site. You can’t run a session for all of them. You can send a one-page sheet through the hirer with the contract, and give the key people (door lead, security supervisor, whoever runs the sound) five minutes with your duty manager before doors.

Load-in with the doors wide open

Build days and get-outs often mean a loading bay or shutter open onto the street for hours, sometimes overlapping with guests arriving or leaving at two in the morning. That’s fine for a fire plan and awkward for a lockdown. Work out who can close each loading door, how long it takes, and whether anyone’s actually standing near it once the event starts. If you have a motorised shutter, find out how long it takes to come down. A simple rule in the hire agreement helps: loading doors closed once load-in is finished, and opened again only for the get-out.

A crowd that came for someone else, and a late finish

Guests at a hired event follow the client’s signage and the client’s host. They know where the bar is and not much more. Plenty of events run late, when people have been drinking and your own team may be at its thinnest. Often the only microphone in the room belongs to the client’s production company, the band or the DJ. If you have a PA you control, that helps. If you don’t, the hire agreement should name who cuts the sound when your duty manager asks, and someone should agree the phrase with them at soundcheck.

Worked Example: Events venue Procedures

A converted Victorian tram depot on a city-centre side street, run as a blank-canvas hire venue. Five employed staff and a pool of casual event staff. One main hall with a glazed street frontage and a mezzanine bar, a green room and office behind the stage end, a kitchen used by external caterers, and a roller-shutter loading bay onto a back lane. Bookings include product launches, award dinners, weekend makers’ markets, and two Saturdays a month let to a promoter for ticketed club nights. Licensed until 3am on Fridays and Saturdays. The busiest booking it can expect to host again is a sold-out promoter night.

Procedure	Implementation
Capacity	610 on a sold-out promoter night (530 ticket holders, 8 artists and their guests, 14 on the promoter’s door and ticketing team, 16 contracted security, 24 bar staff, 4 on the venue’s duty team, 6 covering cloakroom, cleaning and the house AV, and 8 production crew). An award dinner peaks at about 330, so the club night sets the figure.
Evacuation	Main doors onto the street, two fire exits from the hall onto the back lane, and the loading bay once it’s clear of vehicles. The mezzanine comes down its own stair to the side fire exit rather than into the crowd at the main doors. For a fire, people assemble at the far end of the back lane. For a suspected attack, the instruction is to keep moving away from the building and not to gather out front where taxis pull up. The duty manager calls it, the promoter’s door team stops entry and moves the queue on, contracted security cover the fire exits, and a named member of the venue team sweeps the toilets, the green room and the kitchen.
Invacuation	The glazed frontage makes the front third of the hall the worst place to be if the danger is outside. The back-of-house corridor, green room and kitchen have solid walls and no street-facing glass, so the mezzanine bar and anyone near the stage go there. On a full club night they won’t hold 610, so the rest of the crowd moves to the back of the hall, away from the glass. Anyone in the smoking area or the queue is brought inside.
Lockdown	Main doors closed and bolted by the promoter’s door team on the duty manager’s word. The loading bay shutter takes about a minute on its motor, so it stays down during events once load-in is over, and the production manager knows it’s their job to bring it down if it’s up. The duty manager holds the key to the side gate onto the lane. Fire exits stay openable from inside throughout.
Communication	The loudest thing in the building is the DJ, and on club nights the sound system is run by the promoter’s engineer. So the hire agreement names who cuts the sound, and the duty manager agrees a stop phrase with the engineer at soundcheck. The venue team and contracted security share radios, and the promoter’s door lead is handed one at the start of the night. The duty manager calls 999 and meets the emergency services at the front.
Training	Employed staff go through the procedures at induction and walk the routes. Casual event staff get two minutes at the pre-doors meeting the duty manager already runs. Every hirer receives a one-page procedures summary with the contract and signs to confirm they’ll pass it to their suppliers. Before doors on every promoter night, the door lead and the security supervisor walk the exits, the shutter and the safer spaces with the duty manager, because the faces change. A line on the event sheet records who was briefed.

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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Staff Training for Events Venues

Use the briefing you already hold. Most events venues run some kind of pre-doors meeting to go over timings, the client’s run sheet and the bar. Two minutes at the end of it on the exits for tonight’s layout, where people go if outside isn’t safe, who calls it and who cuts the sound will reach the casual staff and volunteers who are actually on shift.

You can’t send a hirer’s suppliers on a course, and the guidance doesn’t expect a course. It does expect everyone with a role in your procedures to know that role, and everyone working on the night, suppliers included, to know how to spot and report something suspicious, so far as is reasonably practicable. A short briefing covers both. Send a one-page summary through the hirer, make passing it on a term of the contract, and spend your on-the-night time on the handful of people who matter most: the hirer’s lead, the door or security supervisor, and whoever runs the sound.

Keep the paper trail. Signed hire agreements with the procedures summary attached, a note of who was briefed before each event, and a record that the layout and exits were checked after the build. If the SIA asks you to show that you specified the requirements to a hirer and checked they were met, that’s what you’ll be showing.

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

Count your busiest booking that’s likely to come round again, including the hirer’s caterers, crew, security and door team
Check whether 800 or more people at once is ever reasonably expected, even once a year, because that makes the venue enhanced tier
Write the four procedures for the building, then a short version for each layout you use often
Add hire contract clauses: exits kept clear, a named lead on site, the procedures summary passed to every supplier, and attendance at a pre-doors briefing
Name in the contract who cuts the sound when your duty manager asks, and agree the stop phrase at soundcheck
Walk the exits after every build and before doors open
Brief the hirer’s door lead, security supervisor and sound engineer in person on the night
Decide who closes each loading door and keep it shut once load-in is finished
Keep signed contracts, briefing notes and layout checks together where you can find them
Be ready to notify the SIA within three months of the duty starting (or within 28 days if you take the venue on later), once the portal opens

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.
Check who the responsible person is. It's usually whoever runs the events venue, which isn't always the owner, and both duties fall to them.
Write procedures for evacuation, invacuation, lockdown, and communication tailored to your events venue.
Make sure your staff and volunteers know the procedures. Brief them, put up posters, hand out one-page summaries. If volunteers help out, read how Martyn's Law treats volunteers.
Keep records of what you have done and who has been briefed.
Notify the SIA once the duty starts. You can't yet: our guide to notifying the SIA explains how it'll work, and the Martyn's Law timeline tracks when the duties are expected to begin.
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.

30-day free trial · No card required · £18/month (usually £38), unlimited staff and volunteers after that

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Martyn’s Law apply to events venues yet?

Not yet. The Act passed in April 2025 but won’t be enforced until Spring 2027 at the earliest, and there’s no way to notify the regulator (the SIA) yet, because the online portal isn’t open. The Home Office published its final statutory guidance on 15 April 2026, so you can plan against it now, though the SIA’s own guidance is still in draft and details could change before the start date. Getting the hire contract wording right now means it’s already in place for bookings that fall after the start date.

Who is the responsible person, us or the hirer?

You, for almost every booking. The responsible person is whoever controls the premises in connection with their use, which turns on control rather than on who owns the building. The statutory guidance says that when premises are hired out, the responsible person stays the same, so a client who books the room for an evening doesn’t take the duty with them. You can ask the hirer to deliver parts of your procedures through the contract, but you keep overall responsibility. The exception is a qualifying event, which is explained below.

Does the hirer have to co-operate with us?

Not under the Act, at standard tier. The duty to co-operate with a responsible person only applies around enhanced tier premises and qualifying events. For a normal hire at a 200 to 799 venue, the law gives you nothing to make a hirer follow your procedures, so the contract has to. The guidance says that if the SIA asks, you must be able to show that you clearly specified the requirements to the hirer and took reasonable steps to make sure they complied. In practice that means written clauses, a procedures summary the hirer has signed for, and a note of what you checked on the night.

A promoter wants to run a 900-person ticketed night. What changes?

First, check your premises licence and fire risk assessment allow that many people in. If they do, two rules come into play. If you can reasonably expect 800 or more people at once even occasionally, and once a year is enough, the venue itself is enhanced tier. A night that’s a genuine one-off, not expected again, can instead be a “qualifying event”. That needs, among other things: members of the public can attend, it’s reasonable to expect 800 or more people present at the same time (everyone working included), and entry is checked, for example by ticket, wristband or payment. Private parties, weddings and invite-only corporate events can’t be qualifying events however big they are. A qualifying event carries enhanced tier duties for that event. Who holds them depends on control. If the promoter takes control of the premises for the event under the hire contract, the promoter is the responsible person for the event, and once the notification rules are in force has to notify the SIA within 14 days of first publicising it. You stay responsible for any parts of the building not used for the event, and because you still have some control of the building, the Act expects you to co-operate with the promoter so far as is reasonably practicable. If you keep control and the promoter only books the acts and sells tickets, the responsible person for the event may well be you. That’s a call to make with proper advice before you sign.

We mostly host private parties and corporate dinners. Are we in scope?

Possibly, and this is one of the few points the guidance doesn’t settle. The Act covers a venue for hire where the events are “principally for the benefit of visiting members of the public”. Ticketed nights, markets, fairs and public launches clearly count. Neither the Act nor the guidance says how a venue that only ever hosts private, invite-only functions is treated, though the Home Office does look at how much time premises spend on each kind of use. If you take public bookings at all, the safer course is to plan as though you’re in scope. If you genuinely never do, read the Home Office’s scope examples carefully, write down how you reached your view, and look at it again if your bookings change.

We already have a fire risk assessment and event plans. Can we use them?

Yes. The statutory guidance says the Act is designed to build on good security and preparedness that already exist, and expects you to keep that work going while making sure the Act’s requirements are covered too. Your fire risk assessment, any capacity conditions on your premises licence, and any event management plans you already write are sensible places for the procedures to live. Two cautions, though. Martyn’s Law doesn’t require an event management plan, so if you use one it’s just a convenient home. And evacuating for a fire isn’t the same as evacuating from an attack. The guidance warns that a fire assembly point could itself be a target, and that a fire alarm going off shouldn’t automatically be taken to mean only a fire. Your procedures need to say which is which.

Do we need to buy equipment, or insist hirers bring security?

No. Standard tier asks for procedures, not equipment. There’s no requirement to install CCTV or barriers, search bags, hire security or pay for a training course, and the statutory guidance says it isn’t mandatory to use third-party products or services to comply. Your premises licence may set its own conditions on door staff for certain kinds of event, and those still apply. Standard tier doesn’t add a door staff requirement of its own.

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Citation

Standard Tier (2026). Martyn’s Law for Events Venues: What You Need to Do. Available at: https://www.standardtier.co.uk/guide/martyns-law-for-events-venues

Last reviewed: 30 October 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.