Sectors
Retail.
A single store is ordinarily below the threshold. A shopping centre is ordinarily well above it. The question is which of the two your premises is.
01 — The use
Sale, display, or service.
Schedule 1 paragraph 1 covers use for the retail sale of goods, the display of goods for sale, or the provision of a service, where that is principally to visiting members of the public. It is drawn widely, taking in a bank branch, a hairdresser and a travel agent as readily as a supermarket.
There is no tier cap on retail, so the ordinary thresholds apply in full — 200 or more to qualify, 800 or more for the enhanced duty.
02 — The determining question
What are the premises?
Almost every retail scoping question reduces to this. The Act applies to premises — a building, or a building and other land, where “building” includes part of a building or a group of buildings. The boundary is therefore a substantive decision, not an administrative one.
- A high street unit. Ordinarily its own premises, and ordinarily below 200 present at the same time. Most independent shops are out of scope on capacity, and that should be said plainly.
- A large supermarket or department store. Comfortably past 200 counting staff and customers together; the question is whether a realistic peak — the Saturday before Christmas — reaches 800.
- A shopping centre. A group of buildings under one operator with common parts, and far past 800. The individual units within it are a separate question from the centre itself.
- A retail park. Often open-air with shared parking, which makes the boundary genuinely arguable and worth settling on paper early.
The statutory test is whether it is reasonable to expect that from time to time that many may be present at the same time. A store seeing 150 on an ordinary Tuesday and 400 in the week before Christmas answers to the 400.
03 — In practice
Turnover is the implementation problem.
Retail shares hospitality’s structural difficulty: a large, young, fast-changing workforce, much of it part-time, with seasonal staff arriving in volume precisely when footfall peaks.
A procedure briefed in September has limited effect on someone who started in November, which is when the premises is busiest. For multi-site operators the practical work is ordinarily less about drafting the procedure than about ensuring it reaches every store, in a form a duty manager can deliver in ten minutes, and leaves a record that it was delivered.
For centre operators and landlords. The duty attaches to the person with control of the premises in connection with its relevant use. Where a centre operator controls the common parts and individual tenants control their units, that boundary must be established explicitly — and it is considerably easier to agree before anyone is required to answer for it.
04 — Engagement
What an engagement produces here.
Retail engagements turn on the boundary. Settle what the premises is, and the tier, the duty holder and the cost all follow from it.
- The premises boundary and the tier, with the reasoning recorded.
- Where a centre or park is involved, the split between operator and tenant, agreed rather than assumed.
- A procedure a duty manager can deliver in ten minutes, in every store.
- A briefing record that survives the seasonal intake.
Scoped to the premises, never to a package, and stated as a fixed fee before work begins — see how an engagement runs.
Next
Use your busiest week.
The scope checker takes the figure you would defend and returns an indicative tier. Nothing is stored.