7th April 2026
It sounds like a straightforward question, but in practice, it’s rarely that simple. With less than a year to go until Martyn’s Law comes into force, much of the conversation is turning to the Responsible Person and protection of premises.
But that is just one part of a much broader picture.
Contributions from Figen Murray OBE and Nathan Emmerich, marking the ‘one year to go’ moment, are keeping attention firmly on the intent behind the legislation and highlighting the risks of it being oversimplified.
From an event delivery perspective, the natural question is: what does this actually look like in practice while we wait for the guidance?
From experience of running events, both large and small, the reality is that events are constantly evolving environments, and decision-making shifts with them.
You see it as an event moves through each phase:
planning → build/breakdown → live → disruption
In the planning phase, authority often sits with those shaping the design, operating model and budget.
As build or breakdown begins, it moves towards those managing the physical environment and site realities.
Once live, it concentrates around real-time decision-making, whether in a control room or on the ground.
And when something changes, it can move again quickly, sometimes settling with whoever has the clearest view, not necessarily the authority to act.
In more challenging situations, that picture can fragment, with different teams reacting, sometimes without full visibility of each other. That’s not unusual, it reflects how complex, live environments operate.
What this highlights is that assigning responsibility on paper is not the same as understanding how it plays out in practice.
Which is why the current conversation around Martyn’s Law needs to sit alongside another one.
Defining responsibility for protection of premises is an important and necessary step. But it sits within a wider, more dynamic system that also needs to be understood.
Viewed in that context, there are some important questions to ask:
Who holds decision-making authority at each stage?
How does that transfer as the event evolves?
Is that understood not just within teams, but across everyone involved in delivery?
And ultimately, who holds the overall picture, and how does that work in practice as the event progresses?
If this isn’t understood in the round, it can become simplified in practice, with responsibility sitting in one place while decisions, and sometimes the relevant expertise, sit elsewhere.
This isn’t a challenge to the intent behind Martyn’s Law. It underlines how important it is that this is being addressed while we can.
It also highlights the need to look beyond individual roles and consider how responsibility connects across the whole event.
In practice, this comes down to two things being understood together:
clarity of responsibility for protection of premises, alongside
a joined-up understanding of how decisions are made across the full event lifecycle
The real test is not just where responsibility sits, but how risk is understood and managed as the event evolves.
I am interested in what others think about how this will work in practice?
If you run live events, you’ll know that control doesn’t sit still. On paper, responsibility is clear. In practice, it rarely stays in one place.
There’s a lot of focus, and some uncertainty, around the Responsible Person under hashtag#MartynsLaw. With guidance still to land, that’s understandable.
But there’s also a risk that, in trying to create clarity, we over-simplify how events actually operate.
Because events don’t really behave as cleanly as they do on paper.
In practice, decision-making moves. It shifts between planning, build, live and those moments when things don’t go to plan, moving between strategic, operational and tactical layers as the event evolves.
Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question: Is there a risk that we see responsibility as sitting in one place, when in practice decision-making is distributed across many?
And if that’s the case, how clear is the shared picture, not just within teams, but across everything happening around the event, at the point decisions need to be made?
More a reflection on how events tend to operate in practice.
Curious how others are thinking about this in their own environments?
It feels like visibility might be part of that answer – National Events Database.
The National Events Database, developed and hosted by the Decision Support Centre, provides a simple route to market for events and venues of all sizes by making What / Where / When information easy to access and easy to understand.
That visibility benefits everyone:
Crucially, it’s free to use and open to all, whether or not an event or venue ultimately qualifies for Martyn’s Law.
