Martyn's Law readiness

The Martyn's Law readiness check reads the design against the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025: is this a qualifying event, and for each duty a qualifying event would carry, does the plan show it, is it paperwork for you, or does it not apply? It is a readiness aid for the organiser, not the security document, and not legal advice.

Opening it

Open it from the Martyn's Law finding in the checks panel, or from the Martyn's Law row under 4 · Event, which reads, for example, "Martyn's Law: qualifying event? unclear · not in force (status read 18 Oct 2026)". It shows what the checks and the Event Safety Plan appendix show, because all three read the same result. Its footer says "Readiness aid, not the security document", followed by the status. On an iPad it is a single column with large state buttons. A reviewer can read it in the editor but cannot change it, and a review link, a share link or an admin (support) view does not offer it.

Is it a qualifying event? The s.3(1) test

All six conditions of s.3(1) must hold. Each reads met, not met or unknown, with its evidence and the section or guidance paragraph it rests on. You answer the questions the plan cannot.

The answer is qualifying event: yes, no (any condition not met) or unclear (any condition unknown, naming it) — never a guess. Events have no 200-person standard tier: 200 and 800 are the tiers for qualifying premises (s.2). When the venue is a building, a note says that if it is itself qualifying premises its responsible person holds the duties, which this check does not assess. Each arena and campsite with a gate on its edge is listed with its drawn capacity as an entry-controlled area (s.3(2), guidance paras 5.40–5.41), and one that could hold 800 or more is flagged to consider as its own qualifying event — a note, since a drawn capacity is not the number reasonably expected.

The checklist

When the event is, or may be, a qualifying event, the check lists the duties it would carry, each in one of three states:

• shown on plan — the design draws it, and the item names the objects. Choosing the item selects them on the plan.
• to document — your procedure or paperwork, which a plan cannot show.
• not applicable — with the reason the guidance asks you to record.

While the plan is being dragged, the items that read the movement and emergency-route checks say "checked after the move completes"; with either check switched off they say so. You can set an item to to document or not applicable with a note — never up to shown on plan, because only the plan can show something. No personal names are stored: not the senior individual, not the responsible person.

Safer areas

Invacuation means bringing people into a safer place. Draw a Safer area zone (in the 🎪 Zone… picker) where people would go. It counts only when it lies inside an existing building on the site, or on a hard-sided structure such as a site cabin, a container or the ticket kiosk — never a tent, a marquee or open ground, because a painted zone on a field is not a safer place. The control room and the lost-children cabin never count, even though they are hard-sided: the control room is itself part of the security layout and must stay free to run the response, and the lost-children cabin is a safeguarding space. A safer area drawn on either reads "does not count". Drawn anywhere else, or running off its structure, it warns that it does not count. An accepted safer area is listed under invacuation with its area and the most people who physically fit, at 0.3 m² a person — our ceiling, read from the gov.uk open-air guide's standing figure, not a shelter standard. Whether it protects against an attack is still your assessment to record. A safer area is not a crowd zone: it adds nothing to the arena capacity and needs no exits. Every safer area is part of the security layout (below), wherever it is drawn, so the outputs that go to other people leave it out unless you tick the security layout in.

Vehicle security barriers and HVM openings

Draw a Vehicle security barrier (HVM) run where hostile-vehicle mitigation stands (guidance Figure 14 names vehicle security barriers). People walk through it, so it never cuts a walking route. A fire appliance cannot: where an HVM line crosses the emergency route it needs an opening. A Removable bollard / HVM opening there lets the appliance through and keeps the line closed (para 8.20's example). A plain Gate passes the fire-route check too, but it is the gap a hostile vehicle uses, so it never counts as protection, and the fire-route finding says so.

An approach is a vehicle line within 30 m (our own reach — the guidance gives no distance, para 7.13) of the arena, entry, bars and traders, or campsite, in the Live phase: a trackway or other drawn road, the site entrance, a car park, or a public road. Protection is judged along the way a vehicle comes: each stretch from where a line enters the 30 m band to where it first reaches the zone must cross an HVM run, at a point with no ordinary gate. A line that passes without reaching the zone is judged by the shortest way from it to the zone; a car park that adjoins a zone is always flagged. Each unprotected approach is a note pinned on its stretch, saying "no vehicle security line between it and the zone" or "crosses the HVM line at an ordinary gate".

Recording a secure entrance or exit

Where a way in really is controlled — a padlocked chain, a removable bollard, a steward on the gate, a key held by a named person — you can record it, in your own words, against the thing it is on. Select a Gate, a Removable bollard / HVM opening or a barrier gate and press ⚙ Parameters; select a trackway, shared drive, road or indicative vehicle route and press 🔒 Secure entry… on the edit bar. Both open the same dialog: tick Secure entrance or exit, choose the control, and write what the measure is and who holds it. The note is required — a tick on its own records nothing — and is one line of up to 200 characters. Unticking deletes the record; undo brings it back.

A record is offered on every way in a vehicle could use, which is why a trackway carries one as readily as a gate: a 3.7 m trackway rated for 12.5 t is a better hostile approach than an indication. It is not offered on a footpath or an indicative pathway, because neither is counted as a vehicle way in, so a record on one would print in two tables and resolve nothing.

A gate's record is attached to an approach only where the way in actually passes through it — the stretch crosses the gate's own footprint, or runs within half its clear width of its centre. A gate standing a few metres to one side of a long trackway controls nothing on it, and nothing is claimed for it. A record on something that is only on site in the Build phase is never credited against a Live-phase approach.

Splitting a line carries the record to both halves and says so: each half's finding and table row add "recorded on this line before it was split — confirm which half it is on". Open the dialog on a half and press Apply to confirm it, or untick it. Dropping the record silently would delete a safety record; copying it silently would say the same thing about two different ways in — which is also why the dialog refuses a multiple selection. A copied or pasted object never carries the record: an opening nobody has looked at must not arrive with an assertion on it.

Where the records print: in the checks, in the restricted Security plan (a "Secure entrances and exits" block, one table for objects and one for lines), and in the Event Safety Plan appendix only with its security tick on. Each row gives the ref, the thing, the control, your note and a State worked out from the checks themselves — "counted as unprotected (finding #n)", "protected by a vehicle security line", "no approach to a crowd zone within 30 m", "not on any unprotected vehicle approach the checks found" (a gate in reach of a crowd zone that no counted approach passes through, which is the usual case), "not checked" with the reason the rule gave, or, below the s.3(1) threshold, one line saying the vehicle-approach checks did not run. The caption claims nothing: recording a control never clears an approach. The record is part of the security layout and is removed from a copy made to send (below), while the gate and the line themselves stay.

Public roads from OpenStreetMap

The design draws its own trackways, but not the public highway outside the red line. So the check also asks OpenStreetMap, through our server, for the public roads near the site (a box of up to about 2 km a side, kept for six hours), and flags where one comes within 30 m of a crowd zone with no vehicle security barrier between. The note names the road and offers a suggested barrier line for you to confirm and draw — it is never drawn for you. It counts any road a motor vehicle can be driven along from the public network, from a motorway to a service road, including pedestrianised streets and busways; it leaves out footways, cycleways, paths, field tracks, private roads and driveways. OpenStreetMap is only as complete as its mappers have made it, so confirm the frontage on site. Offline, with no map location, with the GIS layers off, on a site too large for the box (draw the barrier line by hand there), or when OpenStreetMap's answer came back incomplete, the note says the public roads were not checked and why, rather than staying silent — an incomplete road list is never read as "no roads". A failed lookup is retried after a pause, not on every edit.

Road data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL (openstreetmap.org/copyright).

Who sees the security layout

Guidance Figure 15 treats restricted site plans as a security measure. The security layout is: vehicle security barrier runs, HVM openings, the control room, every camera (the CCTV towers and sentries, including a residential or hire-brand one placed on the event site) and their camera view splays, every Safer area, the recorded secure entrances and exits with the measures noted on them, the vehicle-approach, perimeter and safer-area notes, and the readiness checklist. An indicative pathway is not in it and is never hidden. Members of your workspace, including view-only members, see it in the editor. It is hidden from the outputs that go to other people unless you choose otherwise:

Where it is left out, nothing gives it away: the Objects table and the schedules renumber their refs without a gap, the findings are renumbered, and a fire-route crossing at an HVM line stays listed as a "barrier", because hiding a fail would be a silent pass. The hire schedule never names a vehicle security barrier or an HVM opening at all.

The Security plan (restricted)

🔒 Security plan (restricted)… sits directly under the Event Safety Plan appendix in 12 · Export. It is the one output that holds the whole security layout on purpose, so it is offered only to an editor of the design: it is not there at all in a review link, a share link, a view-only member's view or an admin (support) view. Each time you choose it, a confirmation names the restricted material it contains and asks you to issue it only to people who need it; nothing is created if you cancel, and the answer is never remembered.

Every page carries "Security-sensitive — restrict circulation". It holds, in order:

1. Cover — the design name, the event date and phases, the revision date (the day you export it), and the Martyn's Law line: whether the event reads as qualifying and the same status line the readiness check shows. It says the plan is restricted and that it is not the security document (s.7) itself: your own procedures and assessment are not in it;
2. Martyn's Law readiness — exactly the section the Event Safety Plan appendix prints when its security tick is on: the status, the s.3(1) test, the headcount and its method, the checklist with its states, evidence and your override notes;
3. Procedures — the evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication duties with what the plan shows for each, listed as supporting material and never judged;
4. Security layout — the live-phase plan with every barrier run, HVM opening, the control room, the CCTV and the safer areas drawn;
5. Vehicle security barriers — each HVM run with its style and length, each HVM opening with its width, the secure entrances and exits you have recorded (one table for objects, one for lines, each row with its control, your note and the State the checks reached), and the security findings with their real run names (vehicle approaches, the perimeter, safer areas, and fire-route crossings at an HVM line);
6. Safer areas — each one with its area, whether it counts and why, the most people who fit (our 0.3 m² a person ceiling, not a shelter standard) and the structure it is on, whose access and control the tool does not verify. With no building or hard-sided structure on the site it says so (guidance para 7.24);
7. Control room — where it is, or "None drawn.";
8. Security of information — which outputs show the security layout, and the reminder to revise the plan.

Like the readiness check, it is a readiness aid built from the plan. Its Martyn's Law line is the readiness check's own status line. It never says a duty is met, and it is not the security document, the notification or a risk assessment.

Sending a copy

An ordinary design file keeps everything. When you export an event design that holds any of the security layout from the dashboard (the card's ⚙ menu → Export…), the dialog offers Copy to send to someone else: remove security content. It is off by default and is never remembered, so an export stays whole unless you tick it each time. Ticked, the file — saved with "(copy to send)" in its name — leaves out:

• every vehicle security barrier (HVM) run and every HVM opening, and anything arrayed along an HVM run;
• the control room;
• every camera: the CCTV towers and sentries, including a residential or hire-brand one placed on the event site;
• every Safer area, with its label and lock;
• tags pinned to any of them;
• any object-data field you defined only for the control room, the CCTV or HVM openings;
• every recorded secure entrance or exit — the tick and the measure you noted on it. The gate, bollard or line itself stays: only the record goes, so nothing that counts a gate, an exit or a fire-route crossing changes in the copy;
• the readiness checklist's overrides — each state you set and its note. The security findings and the readiness evidence are worked out from the layout, so they go with it.

The file is saved with "(copy to send)" in its name; however long the design name, that marker is never cut off. Whoever imports the copy is told that it was made to send and that its security layout and readiness overrides were removed. Their checks are worked out from what is left, so they show the site without your measures: with the HVM lines gone, every vehicle approach to a crowd zone will read as unprotected, and the readiness check will say so. That describes the copy, not your event.

What it is not

The checklist is our reading of the Act and the Home Office statutory guidance, built from what the plan can show. It is not the security document (s.7), not the notification (s.9), not a risk assessment and not legal advice, and it adds no fail to the checks, before or after commencement. The guidance names the Purple Guide and the Green Guide (para 8.22); nothing from the Purple Guide's text is used here. The sources, with what each supports, are under Sources and what is ours.