FMJ Facilities Management magazine providing industry-specific intelligence to FM and property professionals
By Mark Coates, VP EMEA, Verkada
Martyn’s Law, officially the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, represents one of the most significant overhauls of public security in decades. We are currently at the midway point between Martyn’s Law receiving Royal Assent in 2025 and coming into full effect in 2027, a critical window for venues, organisations, and local authorities all working to comply with the new legislation.
The legislation, born from the tireless campaigning of Figen Murray following the Manchester Arena tragedy, demands that venues take substantive action to prevent future incidents. It means that preparedness for terrorist threats is no longer voluntary, but mandatory, requiring detailed emergency response plans, risk assessments, training for staff and the appointment of senior compliance officers. Smaller venues – those below 800 capacity – have lighter requirements, but they still must implement evacuation procedures and staff training.
Planning is essential, but technology can play a crucial role too. Many venues will deploy new security tools and train staff to use them effectively. What does this technology look like in practice, and how will UK venues change once the law comes into full effect?
Centralising security infrastructure
The new law presents an opportunity for venues to rethink their security infrastructure. Moving to cloud-based and hybrid platforms centralises operations and simplifies training, daily use, and maintenance.
Practically, this means for-hire employees who may only occasionally work at the venue can pick up security tools easily, as opposed to systems that require days of onboarding. Centralised platforms that operate from a single, intuitive interface mean staff can become proficient in under an hour, rather than spending weeks learning multiple legacy systems.
Modern platforms that unify cameras, access control, sensors, and alarms allow operators to manage one system instead of multiple. Everything appears in a single dashboard, and updates deploy automatically across all devices. This single upgrade is the difference between a chaotic patchwork of systems and an easy-to-use single source of security.
Edge intelligence
Modern platforms don’t just centralise security, they use edge intelligence to detect threats in real time. By processing footage locally on cameras at the edge and combining it with cloud analytics, systems can identify specific behaviours immediately and send instant alerts, without requiring the cloud to analyse every frame. This smart solution fundamentally changes what’s possible for venue safety.
With AI-powered cameras, security teams can automatically count people and identify crowd density issues or receive real-time alerts when someone enters a restricted area, jumps a fence, or a physical altercation is detected. The camera does this processing locally and alerts operators when those anomalous conditions occur, enabling even small, lean teams to ensure that they never miss a critical moment.
For venues looking to comply with Martyn’s Law, this directly supports risk assessment and emergency response planning. Understanding crowd patterns helps identify bottlenecks that could prevent efficient evacuation. It also bolsters threat detection, with automatic alerts ensuring the right people know about developing situations immediately rather than discovering them during post-incident review.
Moving from reactive to proactive security changes how the entire security system works, and will help venues to fully comply with the letter and the spirit of Martyn’s Law. Fundamentally, it allows security teams and planners to identify patterns, receive alerts in real-time, and address unusual activity before a situation escalates.
Continuous learning
In addition to improved preparedness, Martyn’s Law also requires organisations to conduct ongoing risk assessments and show continuous improvement in response to new and emerging threats. In practice, that means learning from past incidents and near-misses, and updating security practices based on evidence. Once again, modern security systems make this much easier for security teams.
With legacy systems, finding specific footage can be a laborious task, and manual footage reviews typically need to happen on-site and can often take hours or even days to reconstruct a security incident. Modern platforms transform this process.
With AI-powered systems, teams looking to review an incident can use natural language queries to quickly find relevant footage in seconds across multiple cameras. For example, security teams can use a search query like “person carrying a backpack today” to find all related footage. This creates an environment much better for learning and refining responses.
With Martyn’s Law just over a year away from full enforcement, many local authorities and venues have already begun reviewing their processes. This is only part of the picture, though. The new legislation, brought about in the wake of the tragedy of the Manchester Arena attack, demands that venues take action to prevent an incident on that scale in the future. To stand the best chance at compliance, and to meet the spirit as well as the letter of the new law, organisations should look to modern security systems to transform the way they protect crowds.
