If you are a business owner, security manager or event organiser you need to be aware of what the Protect Duty means for you?

Protect Duty will apply where there is a capacity of one hundred people or more. Such as public locations, entertainment and sports venues, popular tourist attractions, shopping centres and shopping outlets etc. Plus of course larger organisations in public accessible areas such as retail or entertainment chains employing 250 staff or more and all public spaces such as parks, beaches, main high streets, bridges, town and city squares and popular areas.  In reality his could mean almost every parish church hall, bowls club, cricket club, wedding venue and potentially school hall in the UK.

How Protect Duty affects you?

The enquiry into the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in 2017 found that the public outcry for the eponymous ‘Martyn’s law’ was justified and the Home Office has decided that it should be in the form of the proposed Protect Duty. 

After consultation the Government considers that the owners and operators of public venues and large organisations should comply with Protect Duty. Owners and operators will therefore be required to use information and guidance provided by the Government (including police) to consider terrorist threats to the public and staff at locations that they own or operate, assess the potential impact of these risks across their functions and estate, and through their systems and processes, consider and implement practical and feasible protective security and organisational preparedness measures. For instance, developing a strategy that ensures you have completed a threat assessment of your site and its use, including suitable mitigation measures to protect your staff, continued training for staff, and operational plans in response to an incident or terrorist attack.

For smaller organisations and venues, it would be realistic in completing preparedness measures, to ensure that your staff are properly trained and aware of potential threats, likely attack methods and how they should respond. Staff should be trained to identify the signs of hostile reconnaissance, such as an awareness of suspicious behaviour and activity in and around your site, such as people loitering or displaying an unusual level of interest in asking questions, filming or photographing. Once identified your staff need to know how to deal with it.