Just as the weather is never quite right for farmers, so the pub trade will complain about most things as making pubs less profitable. It’s made for a zero-hours workforce that’s asked to slice lemons thinly for drinks. Martyn’s Law, the legal requirement under the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act to counter the threat from terrorism, will be greeted, once it comes into force, as a burden, writes Mark Rowe.
See also the pages on places of worship; and universities.
A paradox is that precisely because pubs and clubs may not be a specific target, they ought to have protection from terrorism. The Borough Market suicide terrorists of 2017 had, it’s thought, a London West End target in mind, only to divert to London Bridge at the last moment. Then venues had to shut their doors, to invacuate, in line with the basic official advice of Run-Hide-Tell.
The claim of campaigners and the Home Office that Martyn’s Law compliance can be low- or no-cost has some application here; door staff and other pub workers ought to take the free online ACT (Action Counters Terrorism) training. Borough Market, and London bridges are among places are in a less happy position about the installing of hostile vehicle mitigation – bollards and barriers to counter ‘vehicle as a weapon’ attacks – where numerous land owners need to agree, not least over who pays for such physical security.
Scenario training
Also valid is another point of campaigners, that measures to comply with Martyn’s Law are also of use against other crimes. Certainly the National Pubwatch conference at Liverpool in February, featured in the April edition of Professional Security magazine, covered knifings; and drug use. Acid can be a weapon equally for a terrorist or an angry jilted man, if they throw it in someone’s face. As for preparing for those three scenarios – a marauding terrorist outdoors, acid and knife injury – each is in the category of low probability but extreme impact. The problem; pub and other staff and bystanders probably have no experience to draw on; yet training is time-consuming and expensive. And yet as anyone who’s gone through any immersive training knows, scenario training is as much about understanding (and therefore mastering) the visceral, chemical reactions that you go through, when a premises goes into lockdown, as much as the physical carrying out of closing of doors and windows; the experience of sounds outside, not knowing who is doing what to whom. As in the Borough Market attack, that can include the moral dilemma faced by those on guard at a door enforcing the invacuation – whether to listen to pleas of someone knocking and asking to be let in.
Crowd control
Arguably as pressing a risk to life as terrorism is crowd control, given the crush that led to the death of a security officer and concert-goer at the entrance to the Brixton Academy venue on a December 2022 night. Linking the two is the matter of how to control the access of hundreds of people, perhaps from a street to indoors with no stand-off space other than the pavement, as at the Academy, which opened again in mid-2024 with security and other restrictions placed by the licensing authority the London borough of Lambeth. Just as venues will routinely have customers queueing along a pavement, perhaps behind temporary fencing – thereby creating a ‘crowded place’ that could be a target for a ‘vehicle as a weapon’ terrorist – so too in pleasant towns such as Beverley in the East Riding (pictured, July Friday evening, 2025). Partly as a result of covid promoting on-street dining and drinking, a town centre may have considerable public space given over to seated pub-goers, creating however more of a ‘soft target’ (to use the ugly jargon) than any pub’s indoors.
