Hospitality readiness.

01 — Why hospitality differs

Capacity, turnover and crowd behaviour.

Readiness guidance ordinarily assumes a stable workforce, a fixed occupancy, and conditions in which decisions can be taken calmly. Hospitality has none of the three. Four factors account for the difference:

• Capacity is not constant. Premises holding 180 on a Tuesday may hold 600 on a Friday with the function room open. The applicable tier turns on the number that may reasonably be expected — so the defensible figure comes from the busiest realistic occasion, not the average.
• The team turns over. A procedure briefed in March has little effect in September if half the floor staff have changed. Readiness in hospitality is as much an onboarding problem as a security one.
• Alcohol alters crowd behaviour. Evacuation assumptions drawn from a corporate setting do not hold where a proportion of the crowd is intoxicated, queuing, or unwilling to leave belongings.
• Obligations already exist. Licensing conditions, fire safety, door supervision and capacity counts are already in place. Protective security should attach to those rather than form a separate document set.

Mixed use now has an answer

A hotel with a bar, a restaurant and a function suite has several Schedule 1 uses at once, and until recently no clean rule determined which governed. The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) (Principal Use of Premises) Regulations 2026 — in force 15 October 2026 — settle it: the principal use is the Schedule 1 use that relates most closely to the purpose and nature of the premises, and the factors to be taken into account include whether the premises were built or adapted for that use.

For most hotels that will indicate paragraph 8 (hotel, hostel, holiday park) rather than the bar or restaurant use — but it is a judgement on the facts of the building, and the reasoning should be recorded rather than assumed.

What this does not change. Places of worship, childcare, primary, secondary and further education premises are standard duty whatever their capacity, under Schedule 1. Hospitality carries no such cap — a large hotel or venue reaches the enhanced tier on numbers like any other premises.

03 — Engagement

What an engagement produces here.

Hospitality engagements begin at Know, because the tier is rarely settled. The figure that matters is the one you would defend on your busiest night, not the one printed on the licence.

• A capacity basis you can show, and the tier that follows from it.
• Procedures written for a full room and a door team, not an office floor.
• A briefing a duty manager delivers in ten minutes, and a record that it was delivered.
• Arrangements that reach the person who started last week, not only the team briefed in March.

Scoped to the premises, never to a package, and stated as a fixed fee before work begins — see how an engagement runs.