Martyn’s Law and Lockdown: What UK Premises Need to Do

The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act, widely known as Martyn’s Law, exists to make sure publicly accessible premises have thought in advance about what they would do during an attack. It follows the Manchester Arena attack in 2017 and the campaigning that came after it.

The important point is that it is not primarily a shopping list of equipment. It is about having considered, documented and communicated procedures so that staff are not improvising under pressure.

The procedural thinking generally covers four responses. Most organisations find they are strong on the first and weaker on the rest.

Duties are tiered according to how many people a premises may host, with a lighter set of requirements for smaller-capacity venues and a more demanding set for larger ones. The lighter tier centres on having appropriate procedures in place and making staff aware of them.

The heavier tier adds further requirements around measures and documentation. Exact thresholds, definitions, penalties and timescales are set out in the legislation and in official guidance, and these are the details most likely to be refined, so work from current guidance rather than a summary like this one.

Equipment does not make you compliant, but the communication element is difficult to satisfy without a reliable way to tell everyone at once. A procedure that depends on someone physically finding each room does not work at pace or at scale.

This is where a distinct lockdown alert earns its place, and why it must be unmistakably different from your fire alarm. The response to a fire alarm and the response to a lockdown are opposites, so the signals cannot be ambiguous.

Working in this order tends to produce a better result, and means you buy what your plan needs rather than hoping equipment substitutes for a plan.

Ask most organisations about evacuation and you will get a confident answer, because fire legislation has driven decades of drills, signage and assembly points. Ask about lockdown and the answer is often less certain, even in places that have thought about it.

Part of the reason is that evacuation has an obvious success condition: everyone is outside and accounted for. Lockdown is harder to define, because it depends on where people are, what they can secure, and how long it needs to hold.

The other reason is practice. Evacuation is rehearsed regularly and lockdown frequently is not, so staff have a well-worn response for one and a theoretical one for the other. That imbalance is exactly what a written procedure and regular drills exist to correct.

Of the four procedures, invacuation is the least familiar and the most often absent from existing plans. It means bringing people inside from outdoor areas to a safer place, which is the correct response to a threat outside the building rather than inside it.

It matters because it is the opposite of the response most people have practised. A fire alarm sends everyone outside. If the danger is outside, sending people out is precisely wrong, and staff need a way of knowing which situation they are in.

For schools with large outdoor areas this is a practical rather than theoretical concern. A class on a field needs to know where to go, by which route, and how they will be told. That is a conversation worth having before it is needed.

The legislation places weight on procedures being documented and staff being made aware of them. In practice that means the paperwork needs to demonstrate a live process rather than a one-off exercise.

What tends to satisfy scrutiny is not length but evidence of a cycle: a plan, a test, findings, changes, and a next review date. A short document with that trail behind it is stronger than a long one written once and never revisited.

The most persistent misconception is that Martyn’s Law is an equipment purchase. It is not. No product makes an organisation compliant, and any supplier suggesting otherwise is overstating what they can offer.

A second is that having a fire evacuation plan covers it. It does not, because the four procedures include responses that are the opposite of evacuation, and because communication needs to reach people wherever they happen to be.

A third is that small organisations are automatically out of scope. Whether you are in scope depends on the definitions in the legislation rather than on an intuition about size, which is why it is worth checking the current official guidance for your specific circumstances rather than assuming.

Very few organisations are starting from nothing. Fire safety obligations, health and safety duties, safeguarding responsibilities and existing emergency plans all overlap with this, and the sensible approach is to extend rather than duplicate.

The overlap is largest with fire procedures, which already establish alarm systems, drills, roles and record-keeping. What they do not cover is the response that is the opposite of evacuation, and communication that reaches people wherever they are.

Treating this as an extension of existing arrangements also avoids the common failure of producing a separate document nobody reads. A plan that sits alongside the emergency procedures staff already know is far more likely to be used.

A great deal of useful preparation involves no purchase at all. Working through the list below will tell you where your genuine gaps are, and it may reveal that your position is stronger than you assumed.

There is an implementation period built into the legislation, which means this is not an emergency. It also means it is easy to defer, and deferring has a cost when the deadline eventually concentrates everyone at once.

The organisations we see handling this well are treating it as a normal improvement cycle rather than a compliance scramble. They are writing procedures now, testing them over the coming year, and specifying equipment once they know what the plan requires.

That sequence also produces better buying decisions. A site that knows its procedure can specify precisely what it needs. A site buying against a deadline tends to over-specify, under-specify, or both in different places.

Legislation creates duties for organisations, but organisations act through individuals, and this is the point where preparation most often stalls. If ownership is not assigned, the work sits between roles and nobody moves it forward.

The natural owner varies by sector. In schools it usually sits between the designated safeguarding lead and whoever holds estates responsibility. In commercial premises it is often facilities or health and safety. In healthcare it may sit with a governance or risk function.

What matters more than which role is that it is a role rather than a person, that they have the authority to convene the people needed, and that there is a route to whoever approves spending. Preparation that depends on an enthusiastic individual with no mandate rarely survives their next job move.

Board or governor visibility is the other half. Someone at that level should know what the current position is, what the plan is, and when it was last reviewed. That is not bureaucracy for its own sake, it is what keeps the work from quietly slipping down the list.