The 2026 outdoor season falls in an awkward gap. Martyn's Law is on the statute book, enforcement is not expected until spring 2027, and budgets for next winter are being set now. Organisers are being asked to fund measures against a duty that does not yet bite.
In short: The Home Office puts the total cost of Martyn's Law between £1.1 billion and £6.3 billion, split very unevenly between the two tiers. Compliance is governed by what is reasonably practicable, not by a fixed shopping list, and the largest physical cost, vehicle mitigation, is often reachable without capital purchase.
The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 became law on 3 April 2025, with an implementation period of at least 24 months. Enforcement is widely expected to begin in spring 2027. That places the coming season squarely in the pre-enforcement window.
This is not a reason to defer. Contracts signed for the 2026 season frequently run into 2027 and beyond, which means the duty arrives partway through arrangements being agreed now. Councils and festival organisers have been visibly locking in multi-year security and stewarding arrangements that extend past the expected enforcement date, some covering alternating annual events several years out.
The practical consequence for a contractor: you may be pricing today for a period in which the legal baseline changes. A contract with no mechanism for that shift leaves you absorbing it.
The Home Office estimate for the total cost of Martyn's Law spans a wide range, between £1.1 billion and £6.3 billion. That spread reflects genuine uncertainty about how many premises land in each tier and what they choose to do.
Underneath it, published estimates put the standard tier, covering sites expecting 200 to 799 people, at roughly £2,160 over ten years. The enhanced tier has been estimated at around £82,325 over the same period. Treat both as planning indications rather than quotes; they are modelling outputs, and the real figure for any given site depends on what it already has in place.
The gap between those numbers is the important part, and it is not primarily about hardware. The standard tier is dominated by staff time: procedures, briefing, knowing what to do. The enhanced tier adds public protection measures such as access control and CCTV, plus a formal compliance document for the SIA as regulator.
For a security contractor this reframes the sales conversation. At standard tier, the deliverable is competence and documentation, and the cost is mostly hours. Pitching a hardware-heavy solution to a standard-tier client misreads what the duty asks of them.
Compliance is governed by the reasonably practicable standard, which weighs public safety against the cost, time and effort involved. That single phrase does more work than any figure in this article.
It means there is no fixed list to buy. Two sites with identical footfall can legitimately arrive at different measures if their circumstances differ. It also means a decision not to install something can be defensible, provided the reasoning was made and recorded at the time.
That last point is where operators get caught. Reasonably practicable is assessed against what you knew and weighed, not against what you can argue afterwards. An organiser who considered a measure, judged it disproportionate for a specific reason and wrote that down is in a different position from one who simply never addressed it. The documentation is not administrative overhead here; it is the substance of the defence.
Penalties for non-compliance can run up to £50,000 for each day a problem remains unfixed. A daily accrual behaves differently from a one-off fine: the cost of a slow response compounds, which puts a premium on knowing about a gap quickly.
For outdoor markets and street events, hostile vehicle mitigation is usually the single largest line and the one that stops conversations. Standard guidance for seasonal markets covers barriers, controlled entry points, vehicle mitigation, one-way systems for crowd flow, and additional staffing on peak days.
What is less widely understood outside local authority circles is that the National Barrier Asset framework exists precisely so that barrier equipment can be accessed without buying it outright. For a council or an organiser weighing a capital purchase against a season that lasts six weeks, that route changes the arithmetic substantially.
It is worth raising early with a client who has concluded that vehicle mitigation is unaffordable. The judgement may have been made against a purchase price rather than against an access arrangement, and reasonably practicable is assessed against the realistic options, not the most expensive one.
The standard tier being dominated by staff time rather than hardware has a useful implication: most of what it asks for is produced by running the operation properly and capturing it.
In COREDINATE, the checks that a plan describes can be turned into checkpoints, so an emergency exit inspection or a perimeter sweep writes itself into the digital daily occurrence book with a tamper-proof timestamp instead of becoming a box ticked at the end of a shift. Where a measure is judged disproportionate or a hazard is found and cleared, incident recording captures it on the spot with photo and location, which is what a reasonably practicable argument later rests on. Reports turn the season's record into something an organiser can hand to a regulator or an insurer.
There is a commercial dividend too. Footfall by entry point and incidents by time slot are the strongest argument available when next year's staffing level is questioned, and without that data the discussion reverts to price. For the duty regime itself rather than its cost, our Martyn's Law countdown guide sets out what operators must have in place by 2027.
The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 became law on 3 April 2025 with an implementation period of at least 24 months, and enforcement is widely expected to begin in spring 2027. The coming season therefore falls in the pre-enforcement window, though contracts signed now may run past that date.
The Home Office estimates the total cost at between £1.1 billion and £6.3 billion. Published per-site estimates put the standard tier at roughly £2,160 over ten years and the enhanced tier at around £82,325 over the same period. These are modelling indications rather than quotes, and the real figure depends on what a site already has.
It weighs public safety against the cost, time and effort involved, which means there is no fixed list of measures to buy. A decision not to adopt a measure can be defensible if the reasoning was weighed and recorded at the time, which is why documentation carries so much weight under this standard.
Penalties can reach up to £50,000 for each day a problem remains unresolved. Because the amount accrues daily rather than landing as a single fine, the speed of detecting and closing a gap has a direct financial effect.
Not necessarily. The National Barrier Asset framework exists so that barrier equipment can be accessed without capital purchase, a route commonly used by local authorities. Where a client has concluded vehicle mitigation is unaffordable, it is worth checking whether that judgement was made against a purchase price rather than an access arrangement.
Could you show an organiser exactly when each emergency exit was checked across last season? Talk to our sales team or order the 14-day test kit with real devices.