The SIA's September Update on Martyn's Law: What Actually Changed

On 11 September 2026 the Security Industry Authority published a progress update on Martyn's Law, written by Laura Gibb, the SIA's Executive Director for the new regime. It is short, practical, and worth ten minutes of any venue operator's time. Here is what it says, what it changes, and what it does not.

What the SIA announced

The update, published on GOV.UK, covers five things.

• Scope support is live now. Flowcharts on ProtectUK help you work out whether your premises or event is in scope, and the Home Office section 27 guidance carries worked case studies. An online scope-checking tool follows in the new year.
• Compliance templates are coming. The SIA is developing templates for both standard tier and enhanced tier premises, currently being tested with security partners and volunteers, with publication planned over the coming months. Using them will be optional, but they will show exactly what the regulator expects a compliance document to look like.
• Pilot assessments are under way. The first round of pilots with real premises is complete, and a second round begins this autumn.
• The notification portal is being built. Registration will run through GOV.UK, and the SIA is openly asking for volunteers to help test it.
• Principal use guidance is published. A day earlier, on 10 September, the Home Office published guidance on determining the principal use of premises, which decides how a single building with several different uses gets treated under the Act.

What it changes: legally, nothing

There is no commencement date in the update. The Act is still expected to come into force in spring 2027, the tier thresholds have not moved, and ProtectUK is clear that there is no requirement to comply until the legislation is in force. Nothing in September's update creates a new duty.

What it does change is the picture of readiness. A regulator that has finished one round of pilot assessments, scheduled a second, drafted its templates and started building its registration portal is a regulator in the operational phase, not the consultation phase. The implementation period is being spent, and the SIA is visibly spending it.

The quiet headline: the templates

The most useful line in the update is the least dramatic one. Templates for the enhanced tier compliance document are being tested now and published in the coming months.

Enhanced tier premises will need to document their public protection procedures and measures, explain how those measures reduce vulnerability and risk, and provide that document to the SIA under a designated senior individual who is personally accountable for it. Until now, nobody outside the pilot programme has known what that document is supposed to look like. Soon everyone will.

That matters for one simple reason. When the template arrives, the venues that already have evidence of their measures, including what their monitoring actually detects on a real operating day, will be filling in a form. The venues that have nothing will be starting a project.

Multi-use venues finally get an answer

The principal use guidance answers a question that mixed-use venues have been asking since Royal Assent. A building that hosts gigs on Friday, club nights on Saturday and a market on Sunday has several uses listed in the Act's schedules, and which one counts shapes how the premises is treated. The new guidance, made under the Principal Use of Premises Regulations 2026, sets out how that determination works. If you operate a multi-use venue, it belongs on your reading list ahead of any scope decision.

What smart operators do with this

Check your scope now, not next year. The flowcharts on ProtectUK take minutes. Remember the test is the number of people who may reasonably be expected to be present at the same time, including staff, not your licensed capacity.

Volunteer. The SIA wants premises to test the notification portal and the scope tool, and volunteers get early sight of exactly what the regulator will ask for, at no cost. The contact is MLR@sia.gov.uk. For a large venue, there is no cheaper way to get ahead of this regime.

Start the evidence habit early. The Act requires enhanced tier premises to have measures for the monitoring of the premises or event and the immediate vicinity, and official guidance names CCTV among recognised monitoring measures. Most venues already own the cameras. The gap is usually proof of what those cameras catch while the venue is actually operating. Detection records, alert logs and response times are the raw material of the compliance document the templates will soon define.

Where Archangel fits

Archangel turns the cameras a venue already owns into an active monitoring layer, reading behaviour and flagging incidents to your control room as they form, with every detection timestamped and logged. For operators preparing for Martyn's Law, that produces exactly the class of evidence the enhanced tier documentation anticipates: what your monitoring covers, what it detected, and how quickly your team responded. It reads behaviour, never identity, so it stays clear of facial recognition entirely.

The two-month trial runs on your existing cameras at no cost, and the detection report from your own operating days is yours to keep either way. Book a conversation if you want to walk your venue before the templates land.

For the full picture of the Act, tiers and penalties, see our complete guide to Martyn's Law.