Martyn's Law's responsible person: who it is and what they must do
Last reviewed:
The responsible person is the individual or organisation in control of the premises in connection with its Schedule 1 use. The guidance is explicit that this is defined by the Act itself, not a matter of choice between parties: you don't get to nominate someone, and you can't opt out by agreement. It's almost always an organisation rather than a named individual, and it's usually whoever holds the licence or lease and makes the day-to-day decisions, not necessarily whoever owns the building.
How "control" works in practice
Control means physical possession of the premises plus the right to decide how it's managed and used, and who may remain there. It doesn't require owning the building. The guidance sets out several official scenarios that make this concrete:
A leased shop
Where a company leases a shop unit and runs it, that company is the responsible person, not the landlord who owns the building. Possession and day-to-day control sit with the tenant business, and that's what the test turns on.
Pubs: control and the licence decide it
Pubs are a common source of confusion, because ownership, branding and day-to-day running are often split across a brewery or pub company and a tenant. The guidance's own worked example puts the responsible person with the brewery in a tenanted pub where the brewery holds the premises licence, even though the tenant runs the bar day to day. Where instead the tenant holds the licence and is genuinely in control of the premises, the tenant is the responsible person. There's no blanket rule that "the tenant is usually the responsible person." It comes down to who holds the licence and control in your specific arrangement, and that's worth checking rather than assuming. See our guide for pubs and bars for more.
Hired-out halls and one-off events
For the premises itself, the hall's operator or committee remains the responsible person day to day. But for a qualifying event, control can shift: the guidance's example is a private company hiring a village hall for an 800+ ticketed fundraiser, where the company taking control for that event becomes the event's responsible person, with the enhanced-style duties that come with a qualifying event, while the hall committee stays responsible for the premises the rest of the time. If the hall's own committee retains control and simply lets a room, rather than handing over control, the committee stays responsible even if it contracts out stewarding or ticketing.
Retail parks and multi-occupancy buildings
In a retail park or a building split between several occupiers, each occupying business is the responsible person for its own unit, rather than one party being responsible for the whole site. A shopping centre works slightly differently: the centre operator is responsible for the shared parts of the centre, and that can bring the centre as a whole into a higher tier by summing all units together, while individual units are separately assessed and their own occupiers remain responsible for them. Units don't inherit the centre's total capacity.
Body corporate vs individual
In most cases the responsible person is an organisation, not a named person. At the enhanced tier, where the responsible person is a corporate body, it must additionally designate a senior individual who is accountable for compliance. That requirement doesn't exist at the standard tier.
You can delegate tasks, not responsibility
The responsible person can hand day-to-day tasks to staff, a manager, or an outside provider, but the responsibility itself can't be delegated away. If you're using consultants or a service like ours, you remain the responsible person throughout: buying help doesn't transfer the duty, it just makes it easier to meet.
There is no separate "competent person" role
Unlike some fire safety legislation, Martyn's Law's statutory guidance does not create a "competent person" role distinct from the responsible person. The term doesn't appear in the guidance. Whatever expertise is needed to meet the duty, the responsibility for meeting it sits with the responsible person, not with a separately defined competent person.
Next steps
See who Martyn's Law applies to for the full scope test, and the standard tier explained for what the responsible person actually has to do once identified. If you're still not sure who that is at your venue, use the free checker to confirm your tier first, since that often makes the control question easier to answer.
Common questions
Can there be more than one responsible person?
Not for the same use of the same premises. The Act defines a single responsible person by who is in control, so it isn't a matter of agreement between parties. Different parts of a building can have different responsible persons where they're genuinely separate uses, for example a shopping centre operator and the individual retailers inside it, but each unit has one.
What if we can't agree who it is?
The Act's test is control, not a title on a form, so agreement isn't really the point: whoever has physical possession of the premises and the right to decide how it's managed, used and who may remain there is the responsible person, whether or not that's who everyone assumed. If it's genuinely unclear, start from who holds the relevant licence or lease and go from there.
For a pub, is it the brewery, the pub company or the tenant?
It depends on who holds control, and specifically who holds the premises licence, not on who the public assumes runs the pub. The guidance's own example puts the brewery in the responsible-person role where the brewery, not the tenant, holds the licence for a tenanted pub. Where the tenant holds the licence and runs the business day to day, the tenant is the one in control. See our guide for pubs and bars for this worked through in more detail.
About this guide. Written by the Martyn's Law Plan team, based on the statutory guidance published under the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025. Last reviewed: . Read the official guidance on GOV.UK.
Sources: Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025; Home Office statutory guidance (April 2026, updated May 2026) and supplementary documents. Paragraph references are to the statutory guidance. General information, not legal advice. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.