Martyn's Law for pubs, bars and restaurants

Count everyone who could be in at the same time on your busiest night: customers, bar and kitchen staff, door staff, the band or the DJ, and the quiz host. The Home Office counts staff, contractors and volunteers, whether they work full time, part time or the odd shift.

Your beer garden and outside seating count too, when they're part of the pub. The Home Office's guidance gives a pub with a beer garden as its example of a building with land, and its café example adds 30 outdoor seats to the indoor figure. The pavement and the street outside aren't counted.

What doesn't add up is the lunchtime crowd and the evening crowd. If 150 people come for Sunday lunch and 150 different people come in the evening, your number is 150, not 300. It's how many are in at once that matters.

You can use a figure you already have: your fire safety occupancy, your fixed seats plus the staff on shift, or a capacity limit on your premises licence. If the licence limit only covers customers, add the staff on duty.

The law counts the busy times you can reasonably expect, even if they only happen now and then. The Home Office's own guidance mentions a big televised sports event bringing more people than usual into a pub. If you'd expect a night like that again, it counts.

Think about your whole year, not a typical week:

When you hire out your building, you stay the responsible person. The Home Office's guidance says to explain to each hirer what's expected of them, and to be able to show the SIA that you did.

So a wedding party, a birthday or a club dinner in your function room still runs under your plans. The person in charge needs to know the ways out, which room to bring people into, and who calls 999. Put it in your booking terms and keep a note that you told them.

Nothing is required by law yet. The duties are expected to start in spring 2027, and the Home Office encourages venues to start thinking about what the law asks now.

First, work out who the responsible person is. It's whoever controls the pub for its use as a pub, not always the owner. The Home Office's guidance gives the example of a pub owned by a pub company and run by a tenant: the tenant is in control, so the tenant is the responsible person.

Then write your four plans, brief your staff, and look at the plans again once a year or when something changes. There's no course to sit. Your staff need to know the plans and their part in them, and the guidance says a team briefing or an induction can do that.