Attendance & demand
The 🎪 Event demand dialog turns "this many people, this kind of event" into the quantities the site has to provide — toilets, hand-wash, water, medical cover, stewards, entry lanes, exit width, campsite ground, waste, parking and crew welfare. Open it from 4 · Event ▸ 🎪 Attendance & demand…, from the 🎪 Event menu, or from the Generate button, which on an event site reads Attendance & demand….
The inputs
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Event type | A profile that fills in sensible defaults you then edit — see below. |
| Attendance (peak on site) | The most people on site at once. Everything is sized from it. Default 5,000. |
| Event date | The first live day, beside Days. Optional: left blank it reads "not set" and the phases are counted in days only. Set, it dates each phase — the build days before it, the live days from it, the derig days after them — in the dialog, under 4 · Event and on the Event Safety Plan cover. It also decides how the Martyn's Law status line reads for this event once a commencement day is appointed ("in force for this event", or "commences …, after this event's date"); later it will pick the month for the typical weather. |
| Days | The live days. Never fewer than one. |
| Gate hours / day | How long the gates are open each day — it picks the toilet tier (under 6 hours, or 6 hours and more) and is the length of the arrival profile. |
| Build days · Derig days | Days on site before the event opens and after it closes. They are the hire period of anything on site during the build or the derig. Defaults 3 and 2; either may be zero. |
| Alcohol & food in quantity · Camping · Many children | Three switches. Alcohol and food move the toilet tier and the water ratio; camping adds the campsite lines; children and alcohol change the steward ratio. |
| Campers (blank = everyone) | Shown when Camping is ticked. Left blank, every attendee camps. |
| Entry | Turnstile · Ticket scan · Scan + bag search · Open gate (unticketed). Each has a processing rate per lane. |
| Arrival profile (share per gate hour) | The shape of the arrivals over the gate window — see below. |
| Rate of passage basis | Green Guide 6th ed. (82 / 66) — conservative, or gov.uk open-air guide (109 / 73). The two published pairs disagree; you choose, and the output names the one it used. |
| Fire risk (gov.uk open-air guide) | Higher — tent with catering, flammables, crowds or hidden voids · Normal — open air (the usual level) · Lower — small fête, unrestricted egress. See below. |
| Escape time (minutes) | The time to reach a place of safety the exit width is sized for. Clamped to the fire-risk level's band; default 8. |
| Crew on site (build / derig) | The workforce headcount — it sizes crew toilets and wash basins for the build and the derig. |
| Arriving by car (%) · People per car | The parking estimate. Default 2.5 per car. |
Save to design keeps the inputs with the design (undo reverses it); 📋 Copy schedule copies the lines as tab-separated text with the basis of every one. Until you save, the sidebar says "No attendance set yet" and the provision checks say so instead of judging anything.
Event type profiles
A profile is a starting point, not a rule — every value stays editable.
| Profile | Gate hours | Days | Alcohol & food | Camping | Children | Entry | By car |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Day festival / concert | 10 | 1 | yes | no | no | Scan + bag search | 60 % |
| Camping festival | 14 | 3 | yes | yes | no | Scan + bag search | 80 % |
| Agricultural / county show | 9 | 2 | yes | no | yes | Ticket scan | 85 % |
| Community / park event | 6 | 1 | no | no | yes | Open gate | 40 % |
| Sporting event | 8 | 1 | yes | no | no | Turnstile | 70 % |
The arrival profile
Guidance asks that entrances be sized for the peak of the arrival profile but publishes none, so the profile is an input: one share per gate hour from opening, shown as a row of percentage boxes (up to twelve hours). Pick a shape — Peaked — 60% in the middle two hours (the default), Early — ramps down from opening, Even, Late — ramps up to closing — or edit a box, which makes it Custom; shares are normalised to 100 % on save. Below the row the dialog prints the peak it derived — "60% of arrivals in the busiest 2 h … derived from the profile, not typed" — and that peak sizes the entry lanes and drives the queue model, so the two can never disagree.
The fire-risk level
Site-wide, usually Normal: outdoors is normal; inside a tent with catering, flammables, crowds or hidden voids is higher; a small fête with unrestricted egress is lower (gov.uk open-air guide). The level clamps the escape time to the guide's Table 4 band — higher: 5 minutes exactly, normal: 5 to 10, lower: up to 10 — and the dialog prints the clamp beside the select ("Escape time clamped to 5 min at higher risk…"). The same level picks the travel-distance column the exit checks judge against.
The demand lines
Each line is a quantity, a unit, the arithmetic in words, and a badge.
| Line | How it is sized | Badge |
|---|---|---|
| Female toilets · Male toilets · Urinals | By tier. Under 6 hours' gate time: 1 per 100 female, 1 per 500 male, 1 urinal per 150 (Purple Guide baseline, public preview). 6 hours and more with alcohol and food: 1:75 / 1:400 / 1:100; with little or none: 1:85 / 1:425 / 1:125 (council reproductions of the Guide). Counted per female and per male attendee, 50:50 where the split is unknown (HSG195 para 515). | Checked (baseline) · Reproduced (tiers) |
| Accessible toilets | At least one; shown as one per 20 standard units as a placement guide, not a published ratio. | Reproduced |
| Hand-wash units | One per five toilets, never fewer than one per ten (HSG195 §519). | Checked |
| Drinking water points | One outlet per 3,000 at an outdoor one-day event (HSG195 para 472); 1 per 750 for camping or alcohol profiles — HSG195 para 1009 gives it for all-night music events, and applying it to the other profiles is our extension. | Checked |
| First aiders (quick estimate) | Two per 1,000 for the first 3,000, never fewer than two (HSG195 §737). The estimate stops at 6. Above about 3,000, plan medical cover with your medical provider against current industry guidance (the Purple Guide medical chapter, by subscription, which no longer publishes staffing numbers) — not modelled. | Checked |
| Stewards | One per 250 for mobile stewarding posts (SGSA stewarding plan); one per 100 where many children are expected (SGSA SG03, 4.12.c). One per 100 where alcohol sales play a key role, with no children, is our extension (after Lichfield DC; SG03 does not name alcohol). | Checked (1:250; 1:100 with children) · Assumption (1:100 for alcohol) |
| Entry lanes | Peak arrivals an hour ÷ the lane rate: turnstile 660 an hour (Green Guide). Ticket scan 480, scan plus bag search 300 and open gate 1,200 are our planning assumptions, below the 660 ceiling — no UK source publishes a scan or search lane rate. | Checked (turnstile) · Assumption (scan, search, open gate) |
| Aggregate exit width (indicative) | Attendance ÷ (persons per metre per minute × escape minutes) on the basis you chose. The per-enclosure figure comes from the drawn zones and gates. | Checked |
| Campsite ground · Campsite toilets (F + M) | 6 m² a camper (gov.uk open-air guide Table 3, camping area; HSG195's 430 tents a hectare corroborates); campsite tier 1:75 female, 1:150 male, in addition to the arena provision. | Checked (ground) · Reproduced (toilets) |
| Waste arising | 0.5 kg per person per day at a day event (range 0.1–1.6), 1.4 kg camping (range 0.8–3.4) — the AGF Festival Sustainability Insights 2024 averages. No official UK per-head bin ratio exists; containers are a supplier conversion in the hire schedule. | Benchmark · Checked |
| Car parking | Share arriving by car ÷ people per car; about 25 m² gross per car for the ground. A drawn car park overrides the estimate. | Assumption |
| Crew toilets (build / derig) · Crew wash basins | The HSE workplace welfare scale (ACoP L24, Table 1 and para 200), counted at the most crew at work at one time: up to 5 crew 1, up to 25 2, up to 50 3, up to 75 4, up to 100 5, then one more per further 25. UK-wide: HSENI approves L24 for Northern Ireland. | Checked |
Below the lines the dialog lists what it will not compute from a ratio: food and bar units (no published UK ratio — they are placed and counted), medical cover above about 3,000 (plan it with your medical provider), the Martyn's Law headcount (everyone on site at once, crew included — or, when you enter it in the readiness check, your own peak number on site at one time, with its method: 800 is the test for a qualifying event; the 200 standard duty applies only to qualifying premises, not to events; not yet in force) and the Temporary Event Notice ceiling (over 499 on site needs a Premises Licence).
What the badges mean
Every line carries two things: the kind of source — Statutory guidance, Official guidance, Industry guidance, Benchmark or Assumption — and how well we could check the figure itself:
- Checked (green) — primary source read; the figure is reproduced as published.
- Reproduced (amber) — consistent across council reproductions of the guidance; the gated primary text has not been read by us.
- Assumption (grey) — no published UK ratio: an editable assumption, to be replaced by the figures in your own plans.
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