A point that can be easily overlooked – Local Authorities sit at the centre of the event ecosystem (which is why the discussion around Primary Authority is so timely).
On any given day, Local Authority events teams are balancing licensed events, community activity, cultural programming, infrastructure pressures and public safety, often across multiple locations at once – all the while trying to maintain business as usual in a live city environment.
Their colleagues, too, in the planning department might also be processing planning applications for temporary event infrastructure linked to forthcoming events or national commemorations.
I’ve been having conversations with many who highlight just how complex their picture has become, particularly as expectations around coordination, safety and transparency continue to grow, not least in the context of Martyn’s Law.
The challenge at the centre of this is that information sits in different places, sometimes treated confidentially, sometimes subject to permissions, licensing or internal controls.
Different teams, different systems, different partners – all holding part of the picture.
And in many cases, there’s also a natural separation between a Local Authority’s overarching role and its involvement in organising, promoting or supporting events directly and overcoming its own protocols and governance frameworks.
That separation is important, but it can also create points where information doesn’t always flow as easily as it might.
Which makes it harder to answer some simple questions:
What’s happening?
Where is it happening?
When is it taking place?
And how does that connect across time and place?
But also for Local Authorities:
Who is aware of what – and when?
Where do pressures start to build across services, infrastructure or communities?
And how easily can that picture be shared across teams and partners when it needs to be?
Because that same challenge doesn’t stop at Local Authorities – it carries through into sectors like the Night-Time Economy, where visibility across venues and activity becomes just as critical.
The National Events Database is designed to support that shared view – making activity visible in time and place enabling Local Authorities to see the wider picture alongside their own planning and coordination.
If you’re working in or alongside a Local Authority, I’d be interested to understand whether this kind of shared visibility would support your role – and what it would need to show to be genuinely useful.
It sounds like a straightforward question, but in practice, it’s rarely that simple.
With less than a year to go until Martyn’sLaw 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.
Clarity around responsibility is only really tested when something unplanned happens. As Martyn’s Law approaches, many organisations are taking a closer look at whether their structures reflect how risk is actually managed in practice.
Does your current organisational set-up really show who controls risk at your event(s)? It sounds like a straightforward question, but in practice often isn’t.
In reality, clarity is only tested when something changes — when assumptions you’ve been working on suddenly don’t quite hold up.
As commencement for #MartynsLaw moves closer, responsibility for risk is coming into sharper focus, with a defined Responsible Person for protective security. While the legislation is specific, and further guidance is expected, it’s prompting broader reflection across the sector.
Events aren’t single-issue environments. There’s always a lot going on, shaped by the people, the place, the timing and everything happening around it. Risk doesn’t sit in one place, it moves and overlaps.
On any given day, organisers are thinking about crowd dynamics, fire safety, structural integrity, safeguarding, staffing, transport, weather, public messaging and more. Often all at once, and often before the gates even open.
That’s where responsibility becomes important, not just who holds it, but whether the right people are involved to make it clear and workable in practice.
In most event organisations, it doesn’t sit neatly in one place. There’s usually an operational spine, with Operations running the venue or the event, and Safety and Security shaping how risk is identified and managed on the ground.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Marketing and Communications play a big part too. Often sitting in a different part of the organisation, sometimes outsourced, they shape what gets said, how it’s said and how people respond.
If all those parts aren’t aligned, gaps appear, usually because the organisational structure doesn’t reflect how risk is actually managed.
Martyn’s Law doesn’t redraw organisational charts, but it does cut across them. That’s where attention should be focused. This is where simple tools such as RASCI matrices come into their own, helping define who is Responsible, Accountable, Supporting, Consulted and Informed.
Reflecting back to the morning after the Manchester Arena attack, when I was on site at the Chelsea Flower Show, the term ‘Responsible Person’ wasn’t formally in play, but the reality of the role already existed in a holistic sense.
It and the other functions didn’t sit in isolation, they were supported by a strong operational and security structure, close coordination with the emergency services and clear lines into senior leadership. Decisions were collective, but responsibility and accountability was clearly understood.
That balance matters because while the role itself is important, the structure around it is what allows it to function properly.
Making it clear who holds that responsibility is what strengthens resilience.
And that often starts with something simple: a shared picture of what is happening, where it is happening, when it is happening, and who is responsible.
The next question is whether your structure supports that in practice, with the right people involved and responsibility clearly understood in all domains.
And this clarity doesn’t just matter internally, it matters to those outside the fence line too – partners, agencies, rights holders and stakeholders who may need to understand who holds what role, and how to engage.
Shared visibility helps support that understanding.
The National Events Database provides a simple way of making that picture clearer, helping organisers reflect on how responsibility and control are organised in practice and understood within the wider system.
There is still time before full enforcement of Martyn’s Law in April 2027 to test assumptions and ensure your event organisational structure supports how risk should be managed.
