OPINION
The event safety postcode lottery
Halo Solutions CEO Lloyd Major, a former counter-terrorism police officer with over 25 years of operational experience, reacts to the recent report by His Majesty ' s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services( HMICFRS) calling for a government review of public safety at events.
Lloyd Major
In 2015, for my Masters, I surveyed police forces across the country on how they assessed risk for public events. I wasn ' t chasing a headline, I wanted to understand why two similar events, run to the same standard in different parts of the country, could be assessed completely differently: one force treating an application as routine, the next demanding weeks of extra evidence for what was, on paper, the same operation.
What I found was a postcode lottery: a genuine absence of shared standard, not incompetence or a shortage of care. Which force covers your event decides how well it gets risk-assessed, more than the event itself does. Where a force allocates a Strat / Tac / Ops chain of command, it gets worse: the variance comes down to one individual ' s judgement. A risk-averse commander means weeks of homework
and difficult conversations about police resourcing and cost. A risk-positive one means you ' re largely left to it— call 999 if you need anything. Same event, wildly different responses.
HMICFRS has confirmed the same thing, a decade on. Its review calls for government scrutiny of public safety at events and found that the Purple Guide overstates organisers ' legal responsibilities while downplaying the role the police are meant to play. Add the inconsistency in how forces engage with Safety Advisory Groups, and the picture is familiar: organisers doing their genuine best against guidance that asks more of them than it should, propped up by a system that has never been consistent force to force. This is a billionpound industry that built its own guidance and best practice because no one else did, and it ' s still facing a nationwide lack of consistency and support. That ' s bad for the economy and bad for public safety. If you ' ve spent years working to a version of the Purple Guide that asked more of you than the law required, one that set an aspirational standard you worked hard to meet, that isn ' t a failure of judgement. The system has been inconsistent. The professionals working inside it have not.
I ' d be cautious about what a review should produce. Another framework, another document to file next to the last one, won ' t close this gap because the gap was never really about documentation. It was always about whether two different police forces, looking at broadly similar events, arrive at broadly similar conclusions.
We ' ve closed a version of this problem before. Domestic abuse risk assessment had the same force-to-force inconsistency, until the DASH process gave every force a shared standard: the outcome depending on the case, not on who was holding the pen. It isn ' t a perfect analogy but the underlying fix is the same: a shared standard, decisions recorded and evidenced the same way, regardless of postcode. It ' s what I based
“ THE SYSTEM HAS BEEN INCONSISTENT. THE PROFESSIONALS WORKING INSIDE IT HAVE NOT.”
my own research on when I created the national Event Notification Document and the associated Multi-Dimensional Threat, Risk & Harm Assessment for policing public events.
None of that requires event organisers to do more. If anything, less— one consistent set of expectations to plan against, instead of guessing what your force will ask for this year that it didn ' t last year, or that a neighbouring force wouldn ' t ask for at all.
Ten years is a long time for an evidenced gap to sit unaddressed while everyone closest to it— organisers, Safety Advisory Group members, the officers themselves— could plainly see it. HMICFRS ' s review is a sensible first step but the fix isn ' t a new document. It ' s the discipline to treat risk assessment the same way, force to force, so the postcode you sit in stops deciding how safe your event is allowed to be.
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