A Report the Wider Events Industry Should Not Ignore

At first glance, An inspection of the police’s role in safety advisory groups: planning for major public events sounds like a fairly specialist policing report. It would be quite easy for an event manager, safety professional or security provider to look at the title and assume that it is mainly a matter for police forces and Safety Advisory Groups.

That would probably be a mistake.

The report starts with policing and SAGs, but it quickly develops into something much wider: a fairly substantial criticism of the way public events are currently governed, planned and scrutinised in England and Wales.

For anyone working in events — particularly event organisers, event managers, safety advisers, crowd managers and security leads — there is a lot here worth paying attention to.

One of the strongest themes running through the report is the difference between events taking place within regulated sports grounds and those taking place elsewhere.

The report is quite explicit about this. It concludes that the framework surrounding many non-sporting public events is incomplete and that inconsistencies exist in legislation, statutory guidance and governance.

That distinction matters.

It means that a 50,000-capacity festival on temporary land can potentially operate within a fundamentally different governance structure from a 50,000-capacity football stadium, despite both presenting complex crowd-safety, emergency-planning, security and infrastructure issues.

The report appears to question whether that difference remains sustainable.

Probably the most significant part of the whole report is Recommendation 37.

That is quite a substantial list.

None of this means that festivals are about to receive the equivalent of a General Safety Certificate next month. It does, however, indicate that one possible future direction is a much more formally regulated event-safety environment.

For those working outside sports stadiums, this may be the most important long-term implication of the report.

The events industry has traditionally operated through a combination of legislation, licensing, industry guidance, professional competence, contractual arrangements and local SAG processes. HMICFRS is essentially asking whether that mixture provides enough consistency and accountability.

Its answer appears to be: not always.

The report repeatedly comes back to competence.

That matters because event safety is often delivered by people occupying roles such as Event Manager, Event Safety Officer, Head of Security, Crowd Safety Manager, Operations Manager or Event Control Manager.

These titles can mean very different things between organisations.

One person may have twenty years of operational experience, recognised qualifications and extensive experience managing large crowds. Another person carrying a similar job title may have considerably less experience.

The report identifies that inconsistency.

It specifically compares event professionals working outside sports grounds with safety officers working within the regulated sports-ground environment.

That is potentially a very important statement.

The report goes further and suggests that, unless the legislative framework changes, guidance for event organisers should establish a minimum standard of professional qualification.

Recommendation 37 then specifically asks government to consider the disparity in professional qualifications required to manage public safety at different types of events.

For people already working professionally in event safety, this raises an interesting question:

At present, there is no single answer across the wider events industry.

But the report appears to be suggesting that simply having the job title may not be enough in the future.

This could also change the relationship between organisers and Safety Advisory Groups.

The current SAG system is itself heavily criticised in the report. SAGs are non-statutory, there is no consistent national model and different local authorities approach them very differently.

Some events receive substantial multi-agency scrutiny. Others receive considerably less.

HMICFRS wants greater consistency, better SAG training, national oversight and clearer guidance.

If that happens, the industry should probably expect greater scrutiny not only of what the event plan says, but also of who produced it and whether that person is competent to make the decisions contained within it.

That is quite a subtle but important change.

A technically impressive Event Management Plan could become much less persuasive if nobody can explain who made the underlying safety decisions, what evidence was used or why particular assumptions were considered reasonable.

Another important part of the report concerns the quality of event planning itself.

HMICFRS found examples where privately organised event plans were underdeveloped or inconsistent. It also found situations where important contingency arrangements had not actually been tested.

One force considered the potential closure of a major event an important planning scenario, for example, but neither the police nor its partners had exercised that scenario. Some police commanders had also never tested arrangements for deploying police resources into an event if circumstances required it.

That should probably make everyone involved in producing an Event Management Plan stop for a moment.

There has always been a risk within events that the plan becomes the objective.

Except, of course, the document is not the event.

A plan is only useful if the organisation actually has the people, resources, competence and systems necessary to deliver what has been written.

The report repeatedly returns to this relationship between the paperwork and operational reality.

There is also an important lesson here about how event plans are presented.

A good plan should not simply state what is going to happen.

It should allow somebody reviewing the event to understand why the proposed arrangements are considered appropriate.

For example, saying:

does not tell the reviewer very much.

The same applies to barriers, entrances, exits, medical resources, fire routes, evacuation arrangements and crowd capacities.

The strongest event documentation increasingly needs to provide an audit trail between:

That is not a formula stated by HMICFRS, but it is a reasonable practical implication of the weaknesses identified throughout the report.

The report contains several examples where the actual planning structures are arguably more important than the size of the documentation.

Kendal Calling is an interesting example.

The organisers used independent professionals to prepare the Event Safety Management Plan, partners and emergency services had access to documents through a shared portal, three SAG meetings took place and a separate tabletop exercise was undertaken to practise multi-agency responses to emergency scenarios.

That is much more meaningful than simply saying that an emergency plan existed.

That is the distinction between producing event documentation and actually undertaking event planning.

The report is also particularly interested in what happens when the organiser can no longer control the situation.

Many Event Management Plans contain wording along the lines of:

The problem is what happens next.

HMICFRS found inconsistent arrangements for handing over responsibility between event organisers and police. Some events had comprehensive arrangements. Others did not. One handover document reviewed during the inspection was around ten years old.

For event professionals, this should trigger much more detailed thinking.

Those questions should probably be answered before the emergency rather than during it.

There is another section that feels particularly relevant in 2026.

The report discusses the increasing use of artificial intelligence in event safety documentation.

It recognises that AI can assist with drafting and structuring documents such as Event Safety Management Plans, risk assessments and schedules. However, it makes clear that AI cannot replace competent professional judgement, operational experience or detailed knowledge of the individual event.

The organiser remains responsible for the accuracy and appropriateness of the information. Human verification is expected, and transparency about the use of AI is encouraged.

That feels entirely reasonable.

AI can help write a very convincing emergency plan.

Those conclusions still require professional judgement.

AI should therefore probably be viewed as another tool in the event planner's toolbox rather than the event planner.

The report also has some fairly direct comments about private security and stewarding.

It recognises the important role security personnel and stewards play in routine crowd management and access control, while highlighting the limits of their legal powers compared with police officers.

More significantly, the inspection found examples where police confidence in the private security provision influenced the level of policing considered necessary.

There were examples where police had intervened because organisers could not adequately manage public safety, and one historical event was identified where insufficient stewarding contributed to a high risk of crowd crushing.

That makes contractor competence much more than a procurement matter.

If an organiser proposes 500 security personnel, the important question is not simply whether 500 people have been booked.

The questions become whether the deployment is appropriate, whether those people are competent, whether the supervisors can manage them, whether the command structure works and whether statutory partners have confidence that the operation can actually deliver what the safety plan promises.

Anyone involved with crowd movement outside an event perimeter should also read the sections on Zone Ex.

The report found considerable uncertainty over where the event ends, where Zone Ex begins and where responsibility transfers into the wider public realm.

Some organisers take responsibility for areas beyond the event perimeter. Others largely rely upon police and local authorities once people leave the venue.

HMICFRS describes this as one of the most complex areas in event planning because no consistent national definition or allocation of responsibility currently exists.

That becomes particularly important for festivals and city-centre events.

The crowd does not disappear when it passes through the exit gate.

There may still be tens of thousands of people heading towards stations, car parks, taxi ranks, pubs, pedestrian routes and residential streets.

From a crowd-management perspective, the event journey does not necessarily begin at the ticket gate or finish at the perimeter fence.

The report appears to recognise that reality.

Nothing in the report means that an entirely new event-safety regulatory system arrives tomorrow.

But it would also be unwise to dismiss this simply as another policing report.

The recommendations point towards potentially significant changes: more consistent SAGs, greater national oversight, clearer responsibilities, potentially statutory event-safety guidance, consideration of public-event safety certification, greater scrutiny of professional competence and potentially minimum qualification expectations.

For event managers, organisers, security leads and safety professionals, the practical message is probably fairly straightforward.

Good event planning increasingly needs to be demonstrable.

It should be possible to show who made a decision, why it was made, what evidence supported it, what competence that person possessed, what resources are required to deliver it and what happens if the plan begins to fail.

That may ultimately be the most important theme running through the report.

For many years, considerable attention has quite rightly been paid to proving that buildings and sports grounds are safe for crowds.

This report raises a rather bigger question: