The Home Office guidance runs to well over a hundred pages. If your venue holds between 200 and 799 people, almost none of it applies to you. This is the part that does, in the order you should do it.
Four tests. All four must be true for your premises to qualify.
It is not your average Tuesday. It is the busiest occasion you could reasonably expect, even if that happens twice a year. A village hall that holds 80 for a coffee morning and 240 for a wedding reception is in scope. Count staff, volunteers and performers as well as guests. Your fire safety occupancy figure, licence conditions or ticket limit is usually the right starting point.
| Capacity | Tier | What you must do |
|---|---|---|
| Under 200 | Not in scope | Nothing, though the threshold can be lowered to 100 by regulation |
| 200 to 799 | Standard | Notify the SIA and put four procedures in place. This checklist. |
| 800 or more | Enhanced | All of the above plus physical security measures and a documented assessment |
Six things. Notice what is not on the list: no cameras, no barriers, no security guards, no spending.
A notification that your premises qualifies and who the responsible person is. The responsible person is whoever has control of the premises, which is usually the licensee, the trustees, the head teacher or the parochial church council.
How you get people safely out of the building. You almost certainly have a fire evacuation plan already. This is not the same thing, because the threat may be outside the exit you normally use, but it is a sensible starting point.
The opposite. How you bring people inside, or move them to a safer part of the building, when the danger is outdoors. This is the one most venues have never thought about.
How you secure the premises against someone trying to get in. Which doors lock, who locks them, where people shelter, how you keep them quiet and out of sight.
How you alert staff and tell the public what to do. What the duty manager says over the microphone, how you reach someone working alone in the cellar, who calls 999 and who meets the police on arrival.
Procedures in a folder nobody has read are not procedures. Your part time bar staff need to know what lockdown means for them, and they need to know it on the first shift, not at the next annual review.
At Standard Tier there is no legal requirement for CCTV, bag searches, bollards, security staff, alarm systems or any physical works. If a supplier tells you Martyn's Law means you need their hardware, they are describing the Enhanced Tier, which applies to venues holding 800 or more.
An inspector cannot see whether your procedures are good. They can see whether you have them, whether your staff know them, and whether you have practised. Keep four records and you can answer almost any question:
The SIA has said it will take a supportive, risk based approach. For Standard Tier premises, a financial penalty of up to £10,000 applies where a venue fails to act on a compliance notice. In practice that means you are told what to fix before you are fined. The point of saying so is not to frighten you. It is that this is genuinely cheaper and easier to do than to avoid.
Fire evacuation sends everyone to one assembly point by the nearest exit. An attack may make that exact spot the wrong place to be.
Staff turnover is what quietly breaks compliance. Six months of new starters and your briefed workforce is fiction.
A procedure that refers to a fire exit you do not have is worse than useless, because it will be followed under pressure.
Spring 2027 sounds distant. You need procedures written, staff briefed and a drill run before then, not on the day.
See above. At Standard Tier the duty is procedural.
VenuePal starts from the SIA template, drafts your four procedures for your building, and puts a QR briefing notice in your staff room so every new starter is briefed and logged. Run several venues? See every site's readiness on one screen.
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