Build Martyn's Law Standard Tier packs for UK community venues
A guided Standard Tier compliance pack for community venues
Executive Summary
In a nutshell
A self-serve SaaS that walks the volunteer "responsible person" at a village hall, church, school, scout group or parish council through Martyn's Law Standard Tier compliance in under an hour. Generates the four required public-protection procedures (evacuation, invacuation, lockdown, communication), keeps drill and training records, and produces a regulator-ready evidence pack. Statutory guidance only landed on 15 April 2026, with enforcement starting roughly Spring 2027, leaving a tight ~24-month window for an estimated 235,000 volunteer trustees to get ready. ProtectUK templates exist as PDFs, ACRE has produced a sector explainer, but no single product strings the workflow together for the small-premises responsible person.
The Story
Meet the user
Helen took on the secretary role at her village hall in rural Worcestershire after Brian retired in March. Three weeks in, her chair forwards a circular from ACRE: the new statutory guidance for Martyn's Law has been published, the hall hosts a craft fair and a wedding reception that easily clear 200 people, and the trustees are now legally on the hook for four documented public-protection procedures. Helen is sixty-two, runs a small bookkeeping practice from her spare room, and has never written an evacuation plan in her life. The ProtectUK PDF is twelve pages of generic prose. The ACRE guidance sheet is helpful but still leaves her with a blank Word document and a question she hadn't expected to be asked: what is the lockdown procedure for a Grade II listed hall with one main door, two fire exits, and a kitchen serving hatch?
Then a friend on the parish council forwards a link. She enters the venue capacity, picks the hall layout from a small library, ticks the activities they host, and the system writes the four procedures back to her in plain English, references them to the relevant gov.uk guidance, and emails her a PDF pack and a printable poster for the noticeboard. It logs her training session with the volunteer bar staff and reminds her to run a tabletop drill in six months. It costs less than the village hall's annual broadband bill. She presents it at the next trustee meeting and the chair audibly relaxes.
Scores
How does this idea stack up?
7.0/10
Roughly 18,000 community buildings, 40,000 churches, 25,000 schools, 10,000 parish councils, plus scout groups and sports clubs. Even 2% capture at £40/yr is a real business.
Volunteer trustees with no compliance background, fresh guidance, hard regulator deadline, "lots of false information being shared" per the Evangelical Alliance. Capped because government insists no software is required.
Document generation, PDF export, simple tracker, audit log. Standard Next.js plus Stripe plus Supabase. SafeHall is already shipping it.
Statutory guidance published 15 April 2026, four weeks ago. "martyn's law" hit 27,100 monthly searches around Royal Assent and runs at 18,100/mo today. Enforcement starts Spring 2027.
Setup dominates. Annual reviews, drill logs and training records create some recurring need, but customers may churn after year one once procedures are bedded in. 3 to 5 year window before incumbents (insurers, diocesan management systems) absorb it.
Build is trivial. Distribution is the hard bit: volunteer-led committees with no marketing budget on the buyer side, requires partnership channel from day one.
Strongest
Timing
Guidance is four weeks old, enforcement is around 12 months away, and search volume is sustained at 18,100/mo.
Watch out
Durability
Without the drill log and training-record repeat hooks, this trends toward a one-and-done sale. Pricing must reflect that.
Pain Point
The problem
“There is a lot of false information being shared and companies have been in touch with some organisations offering training and products which are simply not needed.”
— Evangelical Alliance briefing on Martyn's Law
The Standard Tier covers any premises where 200 to 799 people may reasonably be present, plus all schools and places of worship regardless of size. The duty falls on the "responsible person", which for a typical village hall, church or scout hut is a volunteer trustee or warden, not a security professional. They must produce four documented public-protection procedures (evacuation, invacuation, lockdown, communication), keep training records for staff and volunteers, and be able to evidence compliance to the SIA on request.
Three things make this acute right now. First, the statutory guidance was only published on 15 April 2026, leaving a ~24-month window before the SIA can enforce. Second, the existing free resources (ProtectUK PDFs, ACRE explainer sheets, NALC briefings) tell a responsible person what to do but leave them with a blank document and a vague brief. Third, the sector has already been targeted by misinformation: legal commentators including the Evangelical Alliance and Edward Connor Solicitors have flagged that smaller venues are receiving cold approaches selling unnecessary services. The trust gap, plus the volunteer-secretary user, plus the four-week-old guidance, is the wedge.
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