Getting started

The Martyn's Law Evidence Kit is a record-keeping tool. The law requires procedures; sensible venues keep evidence of them — this keeps the evidence. It does not make any premises compliant, it is not legal advice, and it certifies nothing.

1. Check which tier your premises is likely to be in

Start at the tier checker. It is free, needs no account, and asks three questions: what the premises is mainly used for, how many individuals it is reasonable to expect at the same time, and whether it occasionally hosts events of 800 or more.

It answers with one of three outcomes, and each means something different for what follows:

Places of worship, and early years, school and further-education premises, stay in the standard tier however many people may be present. A cathedral or a large school answering the checker is told standard tier, not enhanced. Other duties may still apply to very large events held there; if you run those, consider taking professional advice.

A standard-tier result comes with an SIA notification checklist. To keep a dated copy of the result, enter your email address and download it as a PDF — the checklist is in it. A separate box asks whether you also want an email repeating the result's headline (the full result is in the PDF); that is opt-in per request, nothing is sent unless you tick it, and we do not add you to anything.

2. Know what is required and what is good practice

This matters more than any feature, because it decides how much of the product you actually need.

At standard tier the Act asks two things: notify the Security Industry Authority, and have public-protection procedures in place so far as is reasonably practicable. That is it.

Writing those procedures down, drilling them, running refresher sessions and keeping the records this tool produces are good practice — not required at standard tier. Plenty of venues do them anyway, because a procedure nobody has written down is hard to show anyone and harder to hand over when the trustees change. But nobody is obliged to, and any tool that tells you otherwise is selling you something on a false premise.

3. Sign in

There is no password. You type your email address, we email you a link, and you click a button on the page that link opens. The button matters: mail scanners and browsers fetch links in the background, and a sign-in that happened on page load would be spent before you ever clicked it.

Sign-in links are single use and expire. If one has gone stale, ask for another — nothing is lost.

4. Read and accept the terms

The first time you sign in you are shown the documents that govern the Service and asked to tick one box. It is one box rather than one per document because they are accepted together or not at all.

Which documents you are asked for depends on your role. If you are setting up an organisation you are contracting on its behalf, so you are asked for the SaaS Terms and Conditions and the Service Schedule as well as the documents everyone accepts. If somebody invited you into their organisation, you are not a party to that agreement and are not asked to accept it — that is what clause 3(a) of the Acceptable Use Policy says, and the product behaves the way the document says.

Your acceptance is recorded with the document, its version and the time. Nobody can amend that record afterwards through the application — not you, not an owner, and not us — and an owner cannot see what their colleagues accepted.

5. Create your organisation

You are asked for a name and whether you are keeping records for one premises or several. The name is what appears on invoices and in the estate roll-up, so use the body that is actually responsible: St Mary's PCC, not St Mary's.

The choice between one and several is not a paywall — it decides which screens you are shown. A single village hall does not need an estate dashboard, and a diocese does. It cannot be changed from inside the product afterwards, so choose the one that fits — and if you picked the wrong one, contact us.

6. Add your first premises

Straight after creating the organisation you are taken to the form for your first premises. The name and the number of people present at once are required; everything else can be filled in later. But what you put in shapes what the procedure pack says, so it is worth doing properly — see Filling in a premises profile.

What happens next

1. Fill in the premises profile so the procedures are about your building rather than a generic one — guide.
2. Generate the procedure pack, read it, change what is wrong, and adopt it — guide.
3. Record the decision to adopt it, which is the first thing in your evidence trail — guide.
4. Notify the SIA when the notification service opens, and record the date you did. The Act is expected to commence in spring 2027 and the routes will be publicised before then.

If you are setting this up for an organisation with more than one premises, read Running an estate and People and access before you invite anybody.