For local authorities, Martyn’s Law is not just another compliance exercise. Lloyd Major, Founder and CEO of Halo Solutions, argues that councils need shared standards, reliable audit trails and real-time coordination to manage the growing pressure on public safety teams.
A single-venue operator masters one building, one crew, one control room, show after show. A local authority doesn’t get that luxury — the same team might run a community festival one month and a headline act the next, delivered by anyone from seasoned professionals to first-time volunteers. In a new piece for Open Access Government, our founder and CEO Lloyd Major argues that this variation is exactly why local authorities need something a single-venue operator never has to build: a shared standard that holds regardless of who’s running the event.
Lloyd draws on nearly a decade working alongside Luton Borough Council — Halo’s first-ever paying client, back in 2018 — to make the case. Luton International Carnival, marking its 50th anniversary this year, is the clearest proof point: real-time coordination across sixteen-plus partner agencies helped reunite three missing people within minutes rather than hours, among 21 emergencies the Carnival’s teams managed through Halo that year. The same system supported Luton and Bedford’s Covid marshals through 2020, the kind of local effort the Prime Minister himself singled out at the time.
The piece also digs into where Martyn’s Law and the incoming Hillsborough Law actually differ — one sets a baseline for audit trails, the other raises what’s specifically expected of a public authority on top of it — and offers a practical starting point for any council unsure where its own exposure sits.
Read the full piece on Open Access Government →
In this piece for Security Matters, Lloyd Major, Founder and CEO of Halo Solutions and former counter-terrorism officer, turns to a part of Martyn’s Law that’s had far less attention than scope and tiering: the notification requirements the SIA confirmed detail on this year.
His argument is that notification should be the output of an organisation being ready, not the trigger for getting ready — and that the three-month window most people read as breathing room is actually only for telling the regulator, not for working out who’s responsible in the first place. On multi-stakeholder sites, that question turns out to be harder than it looks: landlord, operator, promoter, security contractor and local authority can all have a legitimate claim, and Lloyd argues it needs a workflow across functions, not a single named owner.
He closes on what he calls the trigger mechanism — not the risk assessment or the notification form, but whether an organisation actually finds out when something changes that affects its obligations, before it becomes a problem.
This builds on the operational-readiness territory Lloyd has been developing since the earlier “Compliance to Operational Readiness” piece, but is a new piece written specifically for the notification requirements and Security Matters’ readership, not a repeat of it.
Read the full piece here.
In this piece for Professional Security Magazine, Lloyd Major, CEO of Halo Solutions and former counter-terrorism officer, responds to the Public Office (Accountability) Bill — widely known as the Hillsborough Law — clearing its second reading in the House of Lords on 1 September and moving into Committee stage.
Lloyd’s argument follows on from a point he’s made about Martyn’s Law before: a legal duty doesn’t create the culture it’s meant to protect. Legislation can set the expectation, but it can’t build the habits that make an organisation ready to meet it. That has to happen on the ground, incident by incident, long before anyone comes asking questions.
For security teams specifically, he argues duty of candour lands somewhere particular — they’re often the people closest to a decision, and the first asked to account for it afterwards. Without a reliable, contemporaneous record, a right call and a wrong one can end up looking identical on paper, which he frames as a genuinely unfair position to leave frontline staff in.
This is Lloyd’s second published piece connecting the Hillsborough Law to operational readiness, following an earlier interview for FSM in December 2025. Where that piece introduced the argument, this one sharpens it specifically for a security-industry readership — asking not whether the law is right, but whether the evidence it demands already exists.
Read it here
The Public Office (Accountability) Bill — universally known as the Hillsborough Law — passed its second reading in the House of Lords on 1 September 2026. The Bill now moves to Committee of the Whole House, where peers will scrutinise it clause by clause; no Committee date had been set as of 2 September 2026.
What the Bill would actually do
As set out by Justice Minister Lord Lemos opening the debate, the Bill’s core measures are:
- A statutory duty of candour and assistance, requiring public authorities and officials to act transparently and disclose relevant information proactively during specified inquiries, inquests and investigations. Intentional or reckless failure to comply, where it impedes an investigation, would become a criminal offence carrying up to two years’ imprisonment.
- A requirement on public authorities to maintain ethical conduct codes grounded in the seven Nolan principles, covering misconduct reporting and protected disclosures.
- A new offence of misleading the public, applying to serious conduct meeting the Bill’s statutory tests.
- Replacement of the common-law offence of misconduct in public office with new statutory offences.
- Parity of legal representation at inquests — greater access to publicly funded legal assistance for bereaved families where public authorities are involved, alongside a requirement for public bodies to justify their own legal spend.
Where peers agreed, and where the debate got harder
There was no disagreement in the debate about the underlying principle. Peers across parties — including the Lord Bishop of Manchester, Lord Beamish and Baroness Chakrabarti — backed the duty of candour itself, drawing on Hillsborough, Windrush, infected blood, Grenfell and the Post Office Horizon scandal as the pattern the Bill is designed to break.
The harder questions were about mechanism, not principle:
Will legislation alone change culture? Lord Bichard and Lord Barber of Chittlehampton both argued that codes and sanctions already exist across public services, yet failures still happen — the real test is whether officials’ ultimate loyalty shifts from institutional reputation to the public. Lord Lemos confirmed statutory guidance is being developed with the Ethics and Integrity Commission and the Cabinet Office.
Whistleblower protection was raised repeatedly, including by Baroness Hamwee and Lord Wills, as the piece needed before an inquiry becomes necessary. The Government’s position at second reading was that the Bill’s ethical-code provisions already address this, alongside a forthcoming separate consultation on whistleblower protection across public and private sectors.
The Independent Public Advocate (IPA) does not feature in the Bill. Baroness May of Maidenhead said she was disappointed by this, and the point was echoed by several peers. Lord Lemos said the Government supports the IPA’s role but did not commit to including it in the Bill.
National security scrutiny was mixed rather than uniformly critical: former MI5 director-general Baroness Manningham-Buller said, after examining the mechanisms, that she believed the safeguards for national-security material were adequate — while Baroness May and Lord Keen of Elie both pressed for closer examination of how the duty would interact with classified material.
Scope and drafting questions remain open — how far duties extend down subcontracting chains, whether the new offences are precisely enough worded, and how records (particularly police records) are preserved for future scrutiny. Lord Lemos said he would respond to these in writing and return to them at Committee.
What happens next
The Bill was read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House — its next substantive stage in the Lords, where amendments can be tabled. No Committee date is confirmed yet. Lord Lemos committed to writing to peers on the unresolved points before that stage begins.
Why this belongs in an operational conversation, not just a legal one
Whatever form the duty of candour ultimately takes, the debate keeps returning to the same operational question: can an organisation actually produce a reliable, contemporaneous account of what was known, who acted, and when? That’s not a legal drafting problem — it’s a record-keeping one, and it’s one control rooms and safety teams are already living with, Bill or no Bill.
If you want to see where your own operation’s record-keeping stands against that kind of scrutiny, our free Incident Response Assessment takes a few minutes and asks nothing of you upfront.
Take the Incident Response Assessment →
HMICFRS has concluded that the safety framework for public events in England and Wales is inconsistent, and in places, insufficient. Its report — An inspection of the police’s role in safety advisory groups: planning for major public events — makes 37 recommendations. The most useful ones for anyone organising or advising on events don’t concern policing at all: they’re about who actually owns responsibility for public safety, and whether that ownership is written down anywhere durable.
Why this exists
The Home Secretary commissioned the inspection on 31 October 2025, under section 54(2B) of the Police Act 1996, to examine how police forces work with safety advisory groups (SAGs) and other bodies responsible for major public events. Weeks later, on 27 November 2025, the Home Secretary asked for a rapid additional inspection into West Midlands Police’s handling of the Aston Villa v Maccabi Tel Aviv fixture — the SAG decision to bar all away supporters that triggered international controversy. Inspectors reviewed 856 documents, examined risk assessments and SAG records for 28 events, and interviewed 113 police officers, staff and partner-organisation representatives, alongside a questionnaire completed by all 43 forces in England and Wales.
Four problems, in HMICFRS’s own words
- SAGs have no basis in law. They’re non-statutory. Most local authorities run one; some don’t. How they operate, and which events they consider, varies widely.
- Police training doesn’t prepare commanders for SAG work — and there’s no national risk matrix for non-football events, which HMICFRS says drives inconsistent planning and a missing escalation process.
- There’s no safety certification regime for most public events, unlike the regime that applies to sports stadiums under the Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975.
- Event organiser responsibilities are set out only in the Purple Guide — an industry-published document with no basis in law, which the inspection found organisers frequently over-read as giving them sole responsibility for safety.
The findings that actually change how you’d operate
HMICFRS found the Purple Guide more open to interpretation than most organisers treat it. The Guide tells organisers they’re responsible for public safety at their event, and references the Health and Safety at Work Act — but the inspection is explicit that it never states organisers hold sole responsibility. Inspectors found organisers they spoke to routinely interpreted it that way regardless, which the report says becomes a problem the moment something goes wrong and responsibility turns out to be shared. This is HMICFRS’s characterisation of how the guidance is being read in practice, not a comment on the guidance itself or those who produce it.
HMICFRS found “Zone Ex” — the public areas around a venue, like transport routes and approach roads — has no legal definition. The Purple Guide describes the concept, but the inspection found no single organisation holds clear legal powers over it except the police, which it says drives confusion at the boundary of almost every event. The report separately notes this won’t change when Martyn’s Law comes into force, because its guidance doesn’t define Zone Ex either.
HMICFRS cites one organiser who told inspectors the police had no role inside their licensed area — while holding a protocol to hand command straight back to police the moment a serious incident occurred. The report calls this “an unacceptable state of affairs”: claiming sole authority to justify keeping police out, while expecting them to inherit the risk the instant it materialises. The organiser isn’t named in the report.
HMICFRS found public liability insurance checks are inconsistent across SAGs. There’s no legal requirement for organisers to hold PLI, and the inspection found practice varies — some SAGs routinely check it, others told inspectors they don’t consider it their role, especially on private land where a SAG has no power to prevent an event going ahead regardless.
HMICFRS also highlights an example of good practice worth noting: one major UK event where the organiser and force agreed a formal section 25 policing arrangement in advance, published as public record — commanders told inspectors this left them “absolutely clear about what was expected,” in contrast to another organiser’s undocumented “goodwill payment,” which the report says left the extent of police responsibility ambiguous.
HMICFRS’s guidance is that AI-drafted safety documentation needs declaring and human verification. The inspection found organisers and forces increasingly using AI tools to draft risk assessments and safety plans, and recommends that use must be declared, with SAGs never assuming AI-generated material is complete, current or specific to the event — organisers remain fully responsible for accuracy regardless of how a document was produced (Recommendation 35, guidance due by 31 December 2026).
HMICFRS found private planning portals can quietly reduce transparency. Inspectors said sophisticated organiser-run systems impressed them operationally, but information on them isn’t always shared with statutory partners — one force told HMICFRS it needed the organiser’s permission before it could hand over material for this inspection at all.
What’s actually changing, and by when
Selected dates from the 37 recommendations: a documented handover protocol between police and organisers for command responsibility, for all forces by 31 August 2027 (Recommendation 14); a national events risk matrix with escalation thresholds, by 31 March 2027 (Recommendations 32–33); refreshed AI-use guidance for SAGs and organisers, by 31 December 2026 (Recommendation 35); and a full ministerial cross-departmental review of the entire framework — including whether SAGs should become statutory — by 31 August 2027 (Recommendation 37).
What this means for you now
None of this is law yet. It’s 37 recommendations and a call for government review, not a new duty. But the direction is unambiguous, and several of the gaps HMICFRS describes — unclear ownership, undocumented handover, no durable record of who decided what — are ones you can close voluntarily before anyone requires it. As the report’s own foreword puts it, too many of the people HMICFRS spoke to said it was “a question of when, not if, it will go wrong.”
See where your own event’s decision-making and handover arrangements would stand up to the same kind of scrutiny, with our Incident Response Assessment — a five-minute, self-directed starting point.
The Premier League is back. The EFL and the Scottish leagues never really stopped. And this season kicks off carrying sThe Premier League is back. The EFL and the Scottish leagues are in full swing. And this season kicks off carrying something the last one didn’t: a World Cup summer that reset what people expect a safety operation to look like (whether they would describe it that way or not).
For six weeks, millions of people who don’t normally think about stadium safety watched decisions get made and explained, live: closures, ticket issues, welfare concerns, incidents handled and resolved. They didn’t need to know the difference between an incident log and a command structure to absorb the pattern — things get seen, someone owns them, someone can explain afterwards what happened. That’s the baseline now, whether it’s a Premier League title match or a League Two Tuesday night.
Of course, a tournament across three host countries with a global broadcast budget is not the same operation as a domestic ground on a wet Saturday, and nobody sensible expects the same scale. But scale was never really what people were responding to. They were responding to visibility and accountability. And neither of those requires a big budget to deliver.
The operation doesn’t stop at the perimeter
Access control was one of the summer’s recurring talking points — queues and ticket checks at some host venues raising the same question again and again: where does the operation actually start? The practical answer is before the gate, not at it. The queue outside is as much a part of the afternoon as anything happening on the concourse, and the same goes for the walk from the station, the car parks, the roads around the ground. None of that needs a bigger security operation domestically, but it does need whoever’s managing it to be part of the same picture as everyone inside.
Every check needs an owner
One of the more uncomfortable questions raised publicly this summer was around whose responsibility is it when fans build up outside a venue that’s already full, and how was that pressure actually tested before the gates opened? It’s a fair question at any level of the game. Start with the basics most Safety Officers already run: checks before the match, checks during it, checks after the final whistle, facilities checks alongside them. The value was never in having a checklist — most clubs have one. It’s in whether each check has a clear owner and a clear record that it was actually done, not just ticked off on a clipboard that gets filed and forgotten. A pre-match check nobody can point back to afterwards isn’t really evidence that the pressure was tested at all.
More eyes than the ones holding radios
There was plenty of coverage this summer of stewards and volunteers working long shifts in extreme heat across the host cities — a reminder that public safety includes the people delivering it, not just the crowd watching it. The same principle applies to how they’re heard. Not every club can put a radio in every steward’s hand, and even where budgets stretch further, there’s rarely enough staff or CCTV coverage to see every corner of a venue in real time. Hospitality staff notice things. Other internal teams notice things. And depending on the ground, visitors and the public do too — sometimes before anyone in uniform does. If the only route into the control room is a radio a steward is carrying, things can and will get lost, however good the intentions behind it are. When something serious happens, minutes matter, and a public reporting route isn’t a stretch goal for clubs with time and budget to spare. It’s sometimes the fastest way to catch something before it becomes serious.
Build forms around your ground, not a template
Fan zones were one of the clearest examples of a different kind this summer. Treated for years as the softer side of a tournament, they turned out to carry the same categories of risk as the stadium itself — crowd risk, welfare risk, security risk, reputational risk — just without the fixed infrastructure a ground has. That’s not really a fan zone problem. It’s a reminder that risk doesn’t arrive pre-sorted into whatever categories a generic system assumes. A queue issue, a welfare concern, a facilities fault and a crowd-behaviour incident aren’t the same thing, and shouldn’t be captured the same way. The clubs getting real value from this season’s operation are the ones whose reporting reflects their ground, not a template built for somewhere else.
The record is more than what happened
Control rooms have more feeding into them than ever before — drone detection, AI crowd tracking, tighter screening, CCTV, steward reports, increasingly public reports too. All of it incredibly useful, but more inputs means more noise unless something is actually capturing what came in. What was known, and what was done about it — an operational black box, in effect, the same way a flight recorder doesn’t fly the plane, but makes sure everything is recorded.
A good record isn’t just what happened. It’s what was known at the time, what options were on the table, and why one was chosen over another. That’s the difference between an incident report and a decision someone can actually stand behind — worth building into how your control room works, whatever system it runs on, no matter how many feeds are running into it.
The World Cup will fade from the back pages soon (some say not soon enough but that might just be the England supporters…). Whether your operation can show what happened, and who owned it, won’t.
Halo Solutions works with clubs across the professional game, across more leagues than any other IMS provider, to give control rooms and stewarding teams that same connected picture, in real time. HaloTaskManager gives Safety Officers structured, owned checks before, during and after the match, while HaloEngage extends reporting beyond the stewarding team to hospitality, internal staff and the public. Our flexible customisations allow you to tailor the system to your unique operations.
If you want to see where your own operation has gaps like these, Halo’s Incident Response Assessment is a free, five-minute way to check.
Security Journal UK this week covered the national rollout of The Halo System across all 14 of The Jockey Club’s racecourses, reporting on the operational shift behind the partnership rather than the commercial announcement itself.
The article’s framing reflects a challenge familiar to any organisation responsible for public safety across multiple sites: incident recording that depends on radio traffic, paper logs and individual site knowledge becomes harder to sustain as an operation grows, and harder still to rely on when an incident escalates, a team changes, or a record is needed after the event.
The Jockey Club’s rollout followed delivery at three of British racing’s largest single-day events — the Cheltenham Festival, the Grand National and the Derby — before extending to a group-wide standard across all 14 sites from January 2026. As Lloyd Major, CEO of Halo Solutions, said: “Racing is an important growth area for Halo, and this partnership with The Jockey Club is a major step…”
Two questions for any organisation managing safety across multiple sites:
Would your incident records stand up to scrutiny if compared across every site, not just the busiest one?
Does your standard for recording and evidencing decisions hold on your highest-pressure day, and every ordinary day after it?
Read Mark Fletcher’s full article on Security Journal UK.
Halo Solutions hosted its first ever KICKOFF conference at Watford FC this July, bringing together football safety, stewarding, control room and operations professionals for a practical day of pre-season conversations, learning and collaboration.
Held in the Elton John Suite at Watford FC, the event was created to give sports clubs and grounds the chance to step away from the day-to-day rush and focus on the things that matter before the new season begins: operational readiness, reporting, communication, accountability and the systems teams rely on when matchday pressure returns.
The idea behind KICKOFF//26 was simple: the first fixture should not be the first test.
Across the day, attendees heard from industry speakers and Halo’s own team on some of the key issues currently shaping football safety and sports ground operations, including Martyn’s Law, Showstop Procedure, Hillsborough Law, working effectively with Safety Advisory Groups, operational reporting, record keeping and how clubs can apply wider safety learnings through their Incident Management System.
Practical conversations before the season begins
The day opened with an interactive workshop from Steve Laws, founder of Taylor Bridges Consultancy, on Martyn’s Law and the role of training in compliance.
Steve encouraged clubs and venues to start preparing now, with spring 2027 already approaching, and highlighted the importance of identifying the Responsible Person early, reviewing Home Office guidance and turning compliance planning into practical operational action. He also introduced the new and approved SFJ AWARDS Level 3 Award in Counter-Terrorism Protective Security and Preparedness (CTPSaP)
Steve Allen, co-creator of the globally renowned Showstop® Procedure and keen advocate of the Pink Bows Foundation, then delivered a powerful session on how Showstop Procedure applies to sports club environments.
His session explored the importance of planning, practising and understanding Showstop Procedure before it is ever needed under pressure, with a strong focus on the human, legal, operational and reputational cost of a preventable death at a premises.
Halo Founder and CEO Lloyd Major also led a session on the upcoming Hillsborough Law and what a statutory Duty of Candour could mean for sports stadia.
Drawing on his policing, public safety and major incident experience, Lloyd explored why openness, accountability, clear decision trails and accurate records need to be built into safety-critical environments long before they are ever reviewed after an incident.
Working with your SAG
One of the day’s panel sessions focused on working with Safety Advisory Groups and managing SAG relationships, with guest speaker and panelist Joe Tyler offering a SAG perspective alongside club and operational voices.
The discussion explored what makes for a strong relationship between a club and its SAG, how friction between commercial and safety priorities can be managed, and why communication, transparency, trust and teamwork are so important.
The panel also touched on the wider debate around SAG consistency, standards and the role of SAGs as a link between multiple agencies — not as a body working against clubs.
Bringing the day back to the Halo System
The final session brought the day’s learning back into practical system use, with an interactive and guided look at Halo System features and updates.
The session explored how clubs can use Halo to support clearer reporting, stronger record keeping, better operational visibility, task follow-up and matchday readiness.
For football safety and operations teams, the session connected the dots between the themes discussed throughout the day and the practical reality of managing information, incidents, tasks and decisions before, during and after matchday.
Brilliant feedback from attendees
Feedback from the first KICKOFF//26 was extremely positive, with 100% of respondents saying they would attend again.
Attendees described the day as:
“Great to chat in the margins. Would encourage more to come.”
“The day flowed nicely and was useful and very informative.”
“Very insightful and one of the best conferences I have been to.”
For a first event, the response was exactly what Halo had hoped for: practical, honest, collaborative and genuinely useful for the people behind matchday.
Lloyd Major, Founder and CEO of Halo Solutions, said:
“Pre-season gives clubs a rare bit of breathing room to look at the things that become painful once fixtures start. KICKOFF//26 was about getting the right people in the room, sharing what works and helping football safety and operations teams feel more prepared before matchday pressure kicks back in.”
The start of something bigger…
Following the success of the first KICKOFF//26, Halo Solutions plans to continue building practical, sector-specific events and conversations for football clubs, sports grounds and safety-critical organisations.
A huge thank you to all of our speakers, to Watford FC for hosting us, and to everyone who came along, asked questions and helped make the day such a success.
Safe to say, KICKOFF//26 will not be the last.
Halo Solutions CEO Lloyd Major has been featured in Resilience Forward, sharing his perspective on what Martyn’s Law means for venues, events and public spaces as organisations prepare for the new legislation.
In the article, Lloyd explores why compliance alone will not be enough, with the real focus needing to be on operational readiness. He discusses the importance of clear procedures, confident teams, real-time information flow, reliable audit trails and a strong security culture — all of which will help organisations demonstrate that they can respond effectively when it matters most.
The piece also highlights that technology and documentation both have an important role to play, but only when they support the way teams actually work on the ground.
Football clubs and sports grounds will gather at Watford FC this July to discuss matchday readiness, SAG relationships, Martyn’s Law, Hillsborough Law, Showstop procedure and operational best practice ahead of the 2026/27 season.
Halo Solutions has announced the launch of KICKOFF//26, a new sports-focused pre-season readiness event taking place at Watford FC on Wednesday 8 July 2026.
The free-to-attend event has been created for football club and sports ground professionals involved in safety, stewarding, control room operations, security, stadium operations and matchday planning. Hosted at Watford FC, KICKOFF//26 will bring together clubs, industry specialists and the Halo team for a practical day focused on the checks, conversations and operational improvements teams can make before the 2026/27 season begins.
Designed as a practical alternative to a traditional conference, KICKOFF//26 will cover key themes shaping football and sports ground operations, including working effectively with Safety Advisory Groups, Martyn’s Law and approved training, Showstop for matchdays and non-matchdays, operational reporting, evidence, accountability and pre-season IMS readiness.
The agenda includes sessions from industry speakers including Steve Laws from Taylor Bridges, Steve Allen from Pink Bows/Showstop, and a representative of Hillsborough Law Now on what a legal duty of candour will mean for clubs.
Halo Solutions will also run a practical user-training session looking at how football clubs can use the Halo System to support pre-season preparation, matchday management, incident reporting, operational visibility and utilise new feature uplifts ahead of the new season.
Lloyd Major, Founder and CEO of Halo Solutions, said:
“Pre-season is when clubs actually have a bit of breathing room to fix the things that become painful once fixtures start. KICKOFF//26 is about getting the right people in the room, sharing what works and helping clubs feel prepared before matchday pressure kicks back in.”
He added:
“Football safety and operations teams deal with a huge amount behind the scenes. From stewarding and control room communication to reporting, escalation and working with partners, there are so many moving parts that need to be ready before the first fixture. This event is designed to be useful, practical and relevant to the people who make matchday happen.”
KICKOFF//26 is free to attend, with lunch and refreshments included. Places are limited, open to both existing Halo customers and clubs and sports grounds interested in improving matchday readiness and operational processes.
Event details
Event: KICKOFF//26
Date: Wednesday 8th July 2026
Venue: Watford FC, Elton John Suite
Arrival: From 9:30am
Start: 10:00am
Cost: Free to attend (registration required)
Football clubs and sports grounds can view the agenda and register at:
https://www.halosolutions.com/halo-pre-season-football-conference/