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Martyn’s Law and Truro’s cancelled Bonfire Night: what it really tells us

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Truro City Council has cancelled its Bonfire Night and fireworks display for the second year in a row.

With up to 5,000 people expected, the council treated the event as Enhanced Tier under Martyn’s Law. After a summer of planning around venue, road closures, ticketed entry and crowd management, it concluded the event couldn’t be staged safely within budget while keeping tickets affordable.

It’s a disappointing outcome for the community. I suspect it won’t be the last decision of its kind as councils and community groups plan their winter events.

So it’s worth slowing down and looking at what the law actually asks for, where the uncertainty sits, and how organisers can reach proportionate decisions rather than default ones.

Where Martyn’s Law stands today

The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 received Royal Assent in April 2025. It’s expected to come into force in spring 2027, with the Security Industry Authority (SIA) as regulator.

The Home Office published its statutory guidance in April 2026. The SIA has consulted on its own guidance covering how it will inspect and enforce, and the final version is still to come but rumoured to be this autumn.

Nobody is legally required to comply yet. Organisers are, however, being encouraged to prepare as if the law were already in force. That’s sensible advice, and it’s exactly what Truro tried to do.

Not every large event is in scope

This is the point I think gets lost most often. A crowd of 5,000 doesn’t automatically make an event a “qualifying event”.

For events not held at premises already in scope, two conditions matter. There must be a reasonable expectation of 800 or more people present at the same time. There must also be measures in place to check a condition of entry, such as a ticket, pass or payment. A suggested donation doesn’t count.

That creates a real tension. Ticketed or controlled entry is often introduced for good crowd safety reasons, to manage numbers and flow, and it’s also what can bring an event within the Act.

Organisers should understand that trade-off early and make the decision with their eyes open, rather than discover it halfway through planning.

What the enhanced tier actually asks for

Every in-scope premises and event needs public protection procedures: evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication. These cover what staff and volunteers do if an attack is happening or about to happen.

Enhanced Tier premises and qualifying events go further. They need public protection measures, so far as reasonably practicable, to reduce both the vulnerability of the event and the risk of harm.

Where the responsible person is an organisation, it must appoint a designated senior individual. It must also prepare a document setting out its procedures and measures, including an assessment of how those are expected to reduce the risk.

One detail matters here. The statutory guidance is explicit that the Act assumes an attack could happen anywhere, so the requirements aren’t tied to how likely an attack is at a particular site.

That’s a different starting point from a traditional threat-led security risk assessment. The question is closer to this: if something happened here, how vulnerable would we be, and what reasonable steps would reduce the harm?

The threats the law is designed around

Martyn’s Law is specifically about terrorism, and it helps to be precise about the attack methods it’s intended to address. Recent history gives clear examples.

Vehicle as a weapon. In Nice in July 2016, a lorry was driven through crowds on the Promenade des Anglais on Bastille Day. The Berlin Christmas market was attacked the same way that December. For outdoor events with road access, this is often the first vulnerability to consider.

Person-borne improvised explosive device. At Manchester Arena in May 2017, the attacker detonated his device in the foyer outside the ticketed area as the audience was leaving. Twenty-two people were killed, including Martyn Hett.

Marauding attacks with firearms or bladed weapons. Examples include the Bataclan in Paris in 2015, and London Bridge and Borough Market in 2017, where a vehicle attack was followed by a knife attack.

Hostile reconnaissance sits underneath all of these. Attackers plan, and visible, well-run security is a deterrent in its own right.

It does show how exposed a dense, celebrating crowd is to a vehicle, whatever the motive. Good event planning will address that regardless of what the law requires.

NPSA and ProtectUK already publish a great deal of free guidance on these threats, including hostile vehicle mitigation. I’d expect that material to sit closely alongside the SIA’s regulatory guidance.

The cost question

This is where Truro’s story will generate the most debate. The Home Office’s position is that compliance should be proportionate. Its impact assessment put average annual costs for the enhanced tier at around £5,200, mostly staff time rather than physical upgrades.

Many security professionals, me included, will find that difficult to square with an open-air event for thousands of people. That’s particularly true if the chosen answer involves vehicle mitigation, search regimes, extra stewarding and road closures.

But the Act doesn’t require every possible measure. It requires what is reasonably practicable, which the guidance equates with proportionate.

The risk is that, without clear examples of what proportionate looks like for a community event, organisers price in the maximum and conclude the event can’t happen.

The answer to that is evidence. You can’t protect what you don’t understand, and you can’t defend a decision you haven’t recorded.

An organiser who can show how they assessed their vulnerabilities, which measures they chose, which they considered and set aside, and why, is in a far stronger position than one who either gold-plates everything or does nothing.

Where support can help

Until the SIA publishes its final guidance, we’re all in something of a holding pattern on the detail. Anyone responsible for an event should watch for it and engage with it.

In the meantime, the people carrying this responsibility are often council officers and volunteers rather than security professionals. What they need is a simple, structured way to work through their vulnerabilities, set them against the current threat level and their local context, and record the reasoning behind the measures they choose.

That’s an area we’ve been exploring at HawkSight. It includes how templated procedures for evacuation, invacuation, lockdown, communication and crowd management could be tailored to an event rather than written from scratch.

It won’t replace the SIA’s guidance, or professional judgement where an event is genuinely complex. It could take a lot of the blank-page anxiety out of the process.

Keeping sight of why this matters

Figen Murray has spent years campaigning so that other families don’t go through what hers did. The law named after her son deserves to be taken seriously, and it deserves to work.

A community losing its Bonfire Night isn’t the outcome anyone wants.

If you’re with the SIA, NPSA, a local authority or an events team and I’ve got any of this wrong, or you can see how the final guidance will address it, I’d welcome the correction.

And if you’re planning an event now, what would help you most in reaching a proportionate answer?

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