The guidance landscape

Introduction

Suppose you are asked to check whether a stand, a festival field or a conference hall is safe for the crowd it will hold. Which rulebook do you open? The honest answer is that it depends on the venue, and that several of the rulebooks are not laws at all. Some are free, some cost money, one has quietly disappeared from its publisher’s website, and one of the most important laws has passed but is not yet in force.

Almost every document in this lesson exists because people died. Figure 1 shows the pattern: a disaster, an inquiry, then guidance and legislation. Knowing that lineage is the quickest way to understand why each rule says what it says.

Written after disasters

The first Green Guide was published in 1973, after the Wheatley inquiry into the Ibrox disaster of January 1971, in which 66 people died on a stairway. The Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975 followed: designated grounds now needed a safety certificate from their local authority. The Bradford City fire on 11 May 1985 killed 56 people and led to the Fire Safety and Safety of Places of Sport Act 1987. After Hillsborough in 1989, the Football Spectators Act created the Football Licensing Authority, and the Taylor final report of January 1990 brought all-seater stadiums. The FLA became the Sports Grounds Safety Authority under an Act of 2011.

Sports grounds: the Green Guide and the SGSA

The Green Guide, formally the Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds, is the Sports Grounds Safety Authority’s guidance on the safe capacity, design and management of sports grounds. The current edition is the 6th, of 2018. It is sold by the SGSA, £30 digital or £50 in print, and the next edition is expected in 2028 or 2029. The 5th edition of 2008 is freely available as a PDF hosted by JESIP, which is why this course quotes it where the 6th edition is behind a paywall; the SGSA’s published worked examples confirm the key 6th-edition numbers.

The Guide is guidance, not statute. The statute is the 1975 Act, under which designated grounds need a safety certificate from the local authority. What the Guide supplies is the method: the 4.7 p/m² standing density, the 82 and 66 p/m/min rates of passage, the 8-minute egress time, and the capacity calculation you will do in lesson 3.

The people who apply it on the day need qualifications. The SGSA’s factsheet sets them out by role: stewards hold the Level 2 Certificate in Spectator Safety, supervisors Level 3, and for safety officers “The Level 4 Diploma in Spectator Safety may be considered as a minimum standard”.

Events: the Purple Guide and local practice

Concerts, festivals and other events outside sports grounds fall under general health and safety law, and the reference guidance is The Purple Guide to Health, Safety and Welfare at Music and Other Events, produced by the Events Industry Forum. It is a subscription website. It replaced the Health and Safety Executive’s The Event Safety Guide (HSG195) when the Forum took it over, with HSE support, in 2012. Its crowd-management chapter has a section on safety capacity limits, but its figures are behind the paywall and this course has not been able to verify them.

What can be seen is how councils apply it. One published council interpretation (Buckinghamshire) plans standing audiences at 2 p/m², which it writes as the area divided by 0.5; uses flow rates of 82 p/m/min on the level and 66 on steps, reduced to 72 and 56 where alcohol is served; and sets exit times of 10, 8 and 6 minutes for low, medium and high risk. Treat these as a typical council reading, not as the Purple Guide’s own text.

Locally, event plans are usually reviewed by a multi-agency safety advisory group convened by the council.

Buildings and models

For buildings the rules come from fire safety. Approved Document B (volume 2: buildings other than dwellings, 2019 edition with 2020 and 2022 amendments) gives the prescriptive exit widths you used in module 6. When a design takes the performance-based route instead, PD 7974-6:2019 sets out how to estimate RSET, including the pre-movement distributions, and asks that ASET exceed RSET by an appropriate margin. In the United States the equivalent egress code is NFPA 101.

If an evacuation model is used to support a design, ISO 20414:2020 sets out a verification and validation protocol for building fire evacuation models. It was first published in November 2020, was confirmed in 2026, is written mainly with agent-based models in mind but can be adapted to macroscopic ones, and excludes trains and ships. Module 4’s first lesson explains what verification and validation mean.

Newer law, and a rule from football’s world body

The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, known as Martyn’s Law, received Royal Assent on 3 April 2025. It sets two tiers by expected attendance: a standard tier for premises and events expecting 200 to 799 people, and an enhanced tier for 800 or more. Its duties were not yet in force in mid-2026; there is an implementation period of at least 24 months, and statutory guidance was published in April 2026. The tier thresholds come from secondary summaries, so check legislation.gov.uk before quoting them in a plan.

Some of the most important rules are short. FIFA’s Stadium Safety and Security Regulations, Article 19(b), says: “No firearms or ‘crowd control gas’ shall be carried or used.” At the Kanjuruhan Stadium in Indonesia in October 2022, police fired tear gas into the stands and 135 people died; Indonesia’s fact-finding team named the tear gas as the main cause. Module 8 has the full case.