Who is the responsible person under Martyn's Law?

The one-sentence test

The Act's answer is short. A person is responsible for qualifying premises if they have "control of the premises in connection with their relevant Schedule 1 use" (s.4(1)(a)). For a qualifying event, the Act's separate route for certain large one-off gatherings, the answer has the same shape: whoever will have control of the premises at which the event is to be held, in connection with their use for the event (s.4(1)(b)). Everything else in this guide is that sentence applied to real buildings.

Two phrases carry the weight. "Control of the premises" is a question of fact: who actually runs the place, decides how it operates and can change what happens inside it. "Relevant Schedule 1 use" points at the use that brings the building into scope at all. Schedule 1 is the Act's list of everyday uses, from food and drink through halls for hire to worship, and our guide to who Martyn's Law applies to walks the whole list. Where a building has more than one Schedule 1 use, the relevant one is the principal use, the main thing the building is for (s.4(2)).

Control, not ownership

Notice what the test never mentions: the owner. The deeds are not the test, and neither is the lease title. The statutory guidance puts it plainly: the responsible person is the individual, company or organisation with control of the premises for the purpose of their Schedule 1 use, and control does not require ownership; it can sit with a leaseholder or a licence holder (statutory guidance, para 6.3). The guidance's retail examples land the duty on the company operating the shop, not the landlord who owns the building. Its pub example is the one to know if you run a tied or tenanted house. Where a brewery or pub company owns the pub, a tenant leases it, and the brewery holds the premises licence, the tenant is the responsible person, because the tenant is in control of the premises for their use as a pub (statutory guidance, chapter 6, example 3, as corrected on 6 August 2026). The first published version named the brewery, and the GOV.UK page still shows that old wording in the chapter itself, so go by the correction slip at the top of the page. A pub company is responsible for the pubs it runs itself. And where a pub company keeps real day-to-day control of a pub someone else runs, the answer can be both of them, which is what the joint responsibility rules below are for.

The responsible person also does not have to be a human being. The guidance describes the responsible person as the individual, organisation or company with control of the premises for the purpose of its Schedule 1 use (statutory guidance, ch.3 glossary). Where a limited company runs a venue, the company is the natural fit. It still helps enormously to have one named individual leading the work day to day, but that is good management rather than a rule in the Act.

Operator-run venues: usually the simplest case

For most pubs, bars, gyms, clubs and similar venues, the question answers itself. The business operating the venue controls the premises in connection with the use that puts it in scope, so the operating business is where responsibility sits: the business or person running the pub, the operator of the leisure centre, the club that runs its own clubhouse. Where one company operates several venues, each qualifying premises gets its own answer, and the same company can be the responsible person for all of them.

Committee-run halls

Village and community halls are usually run by a management committee, a charity or a similar body, and that body is usually the one that fits the test: it takes the bookings, holds the keys, sets the conditions of hire and looks after the building. If that is your set-up, treat the committee, or the charity behind it, as the responsible person, record the decision with a date, and note which member is leading on the work. Our village and community halls page covers the sector in full.

If your hall's structure is more tangled, say the building belongs to a parish council but a separate committee runs everything in it, do not guess your way through. Work out who genuinely controls the premises in connection with their use as a hall, and if the honest answer is "both of us, in different ways", the joint responsibility rules below exist for exactly that.

Hired rooms and one-off bookings

The question halls ask most: when someone hires the hall for an evening, does the duty pass to them? The statutory guidance answers it. When premises are hired out, the responsible person stays the same (statutory guidance, para 6.13). The responsible person may ask a hirer to carry out particular procedures, and should explain what's needed, for example in the hire agreement. If the SIA asks, the responsible person must be able to show they did that and took reasonable steps to see the hirer followed it (paras 6.14 and 6.15). The exception is a large event that counts as a qualifying event in its own right, with 800 or more people expected, which is rare for a hall.

Whatever the legal answer in your case, one practical point holds: procedures only protect people if somebody present on the night knows them. A one-page briefing sheet for regular hirers, covering the exits, the safe room and who rings whom, takes an hour to write and travels well. Our guide to staff awareness, not training covers what "made aware" involves.

When more than one person is responsible

Section 4 expects overlap. Where more than one person has control, the Act's references to the responsible person mean each of them, and two or more may act jointly in meeting a requirement (s.4(4)). Multiple responsible persons must also co-ordinate with each other, so far as is reasonably practicable (s.8). In practice that means three things: agree in writing who leads on what, keep one shared set of procedures rather than two competing versions, and brief both organisations' people on the same document.

For completeness, section 4 is expressly subject to Schedule 1, which can specify the responsible person in particular cases (s.4(5)). That is one more reason to read the guidance closely if your category of premises is unusual.

What the responsible person takes on

At Standard Tier the job is deliberately modest. The responsible person sees that the premises have appropriate procedures for the four situations the Act cares about: getting people out, moving them to safety inside, keeping danger out, and telling everyone what is happening. Staff with a role in those procedures "must be made aware of the procedures and their specific role" (statutory guidance, para 7.51). Once the Act is in force, the responsible person will need to notify the SIA that the premises are in scope: the notification regulations give three months from commencement day, or 28 days from the day a person becomes the responsible person if that is later (SI 2026/793, reg. 3). Written documentation is not legally required at Standard Tier (statutory guidance, para 7.32), though it is strongly recommended, because a written record is how you show the duties are met. Our step-by-step checklist turns all of this into an afternoon's work.

And for perspective, the maximum civil penalty at Standard Tier is £10,000 for each breach (s.17(4) and s.18(1)), and before setting any amount the SIA must weigh what you did to put things right and your ability to pay (s.20).

Name them, write it down

If the last few minutes have been you slowly realising the answer is you, that is a useful outcome: the job is smaller than the title suggests. Decide who the responsible person is, record the decision with a date, and tell the people who need to know. If you are not yet sure the Act reaches your building at all, the free tier checker settles your likely position in about a minute. And if your control arrangement is genuinely odd, the statutory guidance is free on GOV.UK, and so is a phone call to us.