Martyn's Law for pubs, venues and attractions
The garden and the function room count too.
Retail and hospitality is the largest slice of standard tier by a distance, at around 84,600 premises. It is also where the counting is least intuitive, because the space people occupy is rarely the space on the licence.
Worked example
What the count actually looks like.
Everyone present at the same moment, on your busiest realistic day. Not an average, and not just the people who paid.
A pub with a function room on a match day
- Main bar and dining room
- 120
- Function room upstairs
- 80
- Beer garden and terrace
- 55
- Bar, kitchen and floor staff
- 16
- Hired-in door staff
- 3
- Present at once
- Standard tier274
274 present at once. The licence covers a smaller number than the building actually holds on the day that matters.
What catches people out
The parts specific to your sector.
Licensed capacity is not the test
The test is how many people it is reasonable to expect present. Your licence, your fire safety figure and your busiest night can be three different numbers.
Outdoor areas attached to the building count
A beer garden, a terrace or a courtyard that forms part of the premises counts. Open land on its own is different, and only caught where a qualifying event is held on it.
A small unit inside a bigger site
A shop or café expecting fewer than 200 inside a larger centre is generally not separately caught, though the centre itself may well be. Check who holds responsibility for what.
Seasonal peaks decide it
For an attraction, a wet Tuesday in February is irrelevant. The August bank holiday is your number.
If you look after several
One report, not one exercise per site.
Groups and operators running several sites get one report across the estate rather than a separate exercise per venue, plus a single place to keep procedures current as managers move between sites.
Home Office impact assessment: about 84,617 premises in this sector are expected to fall into standard tier.
See how portfolios workFind out where you stand in about a minute.
Six questions, a cited answer, and a result you can print and take to your committee. Plenty of places run it and find they are not in scope at all.