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Compliance with Martyn’s Law: the role of the video security industry
In the UK, following the tragedy of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombings, the government introduced the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, commonly known as Martyn’s Law. The act requires publicly accessible venues and events across the country to prepare for and mitigate the risk of terrorist attacks.
The legislation takes a tiered approach to events. Venues that hold 200 to 799 people, classified as Standard Tier, are required to conduct staff training and notify the Security Industry Authority. Larger venues, placed in the Enhanced Tier, must conduct a risk assessment, which may mandate further measures such as bag searches, CCTV and security staff.
Martyn’s Law introduces sensible and necessary measures to reduce the risk of the tragic events of Manchester happening again. Nevertheless, it’s understandable that many businesses are concerned about the additional costs associated with compliance with Martyn’s Law. This is particularly the case in the hospitality industry, one of the sectors most affected by the Law, where many businesses are struggling to balance the books.
Video security providers, such as Dahua Technology, have an important role to play in making compliance with Martyn’s Law affordable and supporting the UK’s hospitality sector. AI has transformed the security industry, making best-in-class surveillance solutions accessible to even the smallest businesses, and many of the advancements in our industry are directly applicable to Martyn’s Law: crowd management solutions allow venues to keep a real-time count of the number of people present, while loitering detection can enable security teams to identify and respond to suspicious behaviour much quicker. Taken together, AI-powered AI video surveillance solutions can significantly reduce the costs for venues to provide high-quality security to meet current compliance standards.
There’s also more that security companies can be doing to demystify compliance for small- and medium-sized businesses. Here at Dahua, we make sure to certify our products to international standards, providing clients peace of mind that our solutions are compliant with all relevant regulations. Our Product Security Incident Response Team is also a key part of our efforts to ensure customers’ compliance needs are placed front and centre of our operations, providing prompt alerts and announcements on cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and round-the-clock incidence response to those in need.
But as Director of Marketing, I know there’s far more that Dahua can be doing to improve our outreach with small- and medium-sized enterprises. Security compliance doesn’t have to be difficult, nor does it have to be expensive. It’s our job as experts in the security industry to take this message to our colleagues in the hospitality sector.
