Martyn's Law and your hall
Village halls, church halls and community centres have a particular problem with this Act: the building is run by a committee of volunteers, the people using it on any given evening usually do not work there, and the number of people inside changes completely from one booking to the next. This page covers what decides whether the Act applies to you, who holds the duty when you hire the hall out, and what the four procedures mean in a building nobody staffs.
First: whether it applies to you at all
The Act turns on the number of people you would reasonably expect in the building at the same time, at your busiest realistic moment, counting anyone helping to run the event as well as the people attending.
| People at once | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|
| Up to 199 | The Act does not apply |
| 200 to 799 | Standard tier |
| 800 and above | Enhanced tier, which we do not cover |
These bands come from the same checker that answers the free scope check, so this table cannot say one thing while the checker says another. The check asks about your building; this table is only the shape of the rule.
Most village and church halls sit in the first row and owe nothing at all. If that is you, we will tell you so, in writing, free, and you can stop there.
Who holds the duty when you hire the hall out
This is the question committees get wrong most often, and the answer is clearer than most people expect. Hiring the hall out does not move the duty to the hirer. The responsible person for the premises stays the same when different organisations use the building, and keeps responsibility for overall compliance. That is guidance paragraphs 6.13 and 6.14.
What you can do is require things of the people who hire from you. Paragraph 6.15 expects that to be specified in the hire agreement, in the same way halls already handle fire safety, and it goes further: if the regulator asks, the responsible person has to be able to show they told the hirer clearly and took reasonable steps to see it was followed. So the practical duty on a committee is not to police every booking. It is to say the right things in the hire agreement, hand over something the hirer can actually use, and be able to show that you did.
The one exception, and why it almost certainly does not apply to you
Paragraph 6.13 does contain an exception: the responsible person changes if an event at standard tier premises meets the criteria to be a qualifying event and has a different responsible person of its own. A committee that reads the paragraph above and then meets that exception would have been badly misled, so here it is plainly.
A qualifying event has to satisfy all six criteria in section 3 of the Act. One of them is that it is reasonable to expect 800 or more people present at the same time. Another is that the premises are not already enhanced tier. For a village or church hall, the first of those settles it: a hall that can hold 800 people at once is not the kind of building this page is about. If your hall could not physically hold 800 people, the exception cannot apply to you, and the duty stays with the committee for every booking you take.
Capacity that changes with every booking
A hall might hold a parish meeting of thirty on Monday, a toddler group of twenty on Tuesday and a wedding reception of two hundred and forty on Saturday. The Act asks for the realistic peak, which means the busiest thing you actually host, not the average and not the fire capacity on the certificate. For a hall that number is genuinely hard to pin down, and it is the single answer that decides everything else, which is why our check asks about it carefully rather than asking you to pick a band.
What the four procedures mean in a building nobody staffs
Evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication. In a hall the difficulty is never writing them. It is that the person who would have to carry them out on a Saturday night has never met you.
Procedures a hirer can follow without training
Whoever is running the event is the person who will act, and they will not have read a policy document. What works is short, specific and physical: which doors, in which direction, where people gather, what gets said out loud. Our pack produces a one-page hirer and event leader briefing for halls that take bookings, naming your exits and the announcement wording, meant to go out with every booking confirmation. That is also the thing paragraph 6.15 expects you to be able to point at.
A committee with no staff and no budget line
Nobody at a village hall does this full time, and there is rarely a budget for it. That shaped the product more than anything else: the questions are answerable by someone who knows the building rather than someone who knows the Act, they can be answered while walking around, and the answers save as you go so it can be done in instalments between other commitments.
Doors that are locked, propped, or the only way out
Halls tend to have one main entrance, a fire door onto a car park and a kitchen door that is bolted when the kitchen is not in use. Which of those counts as a way out, which is only a way out, and which a hirer will actually find in the dark are questions about your building. A generic procedure cannot answer them, and a procedure that names the wrong door is worse than none.
What we do, and what we do not
Four Drills asks you about your hall, checks your answers against each other for gaps, and produces the four procedures with the paragraph numbers shown so you can check them against the guidance yourself. It is a documentation product. It cannot tell you that you are compliant, and it never will: compliance depends on what is true in your building on the day. The people who understand your hall are the people who run it.
Where you stand, and what it costs
Below the threshold in the table above there is no duty, no deadline and nothing to register. Plenty of halls want the procedures anyway, because a committee that has thought about this once is in a better position than one that has not, and for them the pack is voluntary and costs £79 + VAT a year. Above the threshold, the standard tier pack is £199 + VAT a year per venue.
Duties commence in spring 2027. Statutory guidance, April 2026 edition, corrected 6 August 2026. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and we are not affiliated with the Home Office, the Security Industry Authority or ProtectUK.