Does Martyn’s Law apply to churches?

Two beliefs are doing the rounds in parishes, and both are wrong. The first is that churches are exempt from Martyn’s Law. The second is that a large cathedral-sized congregation drags you into the heavy end of the law. Neither is true, and the truth is simpler and kinder than both.

The threshold applies to you exactly as it applies to everyone else

There is no faith exemption in this Act. A church, chapel, meeting house, mosque, synagogue, temple or gurdwara is in scope on the same test as a cinema or a conference centre: 200 or more people reasonably expected on the premises at the same time, counting clergy, staff and volunteers.

So the parish church that gathers thirty on a Sunday and ninety at Christmas is out of scope. Not lightly regulated — out. That is the answer for a great many churches, and nobody should be selling you anything on the strength of a duty you do not have.

The concession you do get: you stay in the standard tier

Here is the part that matters for the large ones. Normally, 800 people or more puts a premises into the enhanced tier — a heavier regime, with a documented assessment and additional measures.

Places of worship are treated differently. The statutory guidance is explicit: places of worship that can reasonably expect 200 or more people to be present at the same time “will be in scope of the standard tier, even if that number of expected individuals is 800 or more” (para 4.37).

In plain terms: a packed cathedral at Midnight Mass is still standard tier. Your Easter, your Christmas, your big civic funeral — none of them escalate you. You have the lighter duties, and you keep them however full the building gets.

What the standard tier asks of a church

Notify the regulator, and have procedures for what you would do in an emergency: getting everybody out (evacuation), bringing everybody in and shutting the doors (invacuation), securing the building against someone dangerous (lockdown), and how the alarm is raised and 999 is called (communication).

Note what is not on that list. Nothing about locking the church during the day. Nothing about searching bags, screening people, or putting a barrier across a porch that has been open to the parish for four hundred years. The duty is to think, agree, and be ready — not to stop being a church.

The things that are genuinely different about a church building

• Open access is the point. Many churches are unlocked and unstaffed for hours. The right response is not to lock the door; it is to know what the churchwarden or the person on duty would do, and to make sure that person is never alone with the question.
• The building fights you. Heavy doors that only lock with a key from the outside. A vestry with one way in. Glass you would not want to be standing under. These are worth naming honestly in your procedures rather than writing a plan that pretends the building is something it is not.
• The congregation is not a crowd of strangers. You know the people who need help down a step, and you know who would freeze. That is an advantage a stadium does not have. Use it: name a helper for each person who needs one, before the service, not during it.
• Volunteers turn over constantly, and the sidesperson on their first Sunday is exactly the person who needs to know what to do. Which is why a procedure in someone’s head is not much of a procedure.

Who is the responsible person?

Whoever is in control of the premises. In a Church of England parish that is normally the PCC, with the incumbent or a churchwarden as the named contact; in other traditions it may be the trustees, the elders, the mosque committee or the management body. Name the role, not just the person, and use a role email — people move on and notifications go stale.

If your church is one of several in a benefice or a group, the duty attaches to the premises. Four churches means four sets of answers, even if the same handful of people are answering for all of them.

Is it worth writing anything down?

The law does not make you, at the standard tier. We say that plainly even though we sell the documents.

Churches choose to anyway, for a reason peculiar to churches: you have more volunteers, turning over more often, than almost any other kind of premises in the country. The briefing sheet you hand a new sidesperson is worth more to you than the procedure it summarises. And if a bishop, an insurer, an archdeacon or a coroner ever asks what your procedures are, an adopted, dated document is a very short conversation.