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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.