Every Tuesday evening, a youth football club hires the school pitch.
Its coach opens the gate, runs the session and locks up afterwards. There might be 40 or 50 people on site, with nobody from the school involved beyond handing over the keys.
It feels as though responsibility has moved with them.
Under Martyn’s Law, it may not have.
The football club can be given specific jobs. Its hire agreement can explain what the coach must do. But if the school is qualifying premises, hiring out the pitch does not automatically change the person responsible under the Act.
In this week’s episode of Let’s Talk Premises, we look at the Home Office’s latest guidance on principal use—and the gap many hire agreements overlook. Insurance and indemnity clauses may affect who pays if something goes wrong, but hiring out school facilities does not automatically transfer responsibility under Martyn’s Law.
You’ll find the episode at the end of this article.
This matters now because, on 10 September, the Home Office published new guidance, alongside regulations, explaining how to identify a premises’ principal use.
The regulations take effect on 15 October 2026. They introduce the method for deciding principal use. They do not switch on the main Martyn’s Law duties, which are only expected to come into force in spring 2027.[1]
You can see why people might assume the answer changes with whoever happens to be there.
It is a school during the day. In the evening, the pupils and teachers have gone home, a football club has the keys and its coach appears to be in charge.
But that is not how the principal-use test starts.
It looks first at what the premises fundamentally are. What were they built or modified for? What are they still used for? What do their physical characteristics tell us? How does the local authority treat them?[1]
Only if those questions do not produce a clear answer do you move on to things such as how much space each activity occupies, how long each use lasts and whether one activity supports another.
For a conventional school site, those factors will normally point towards education. A football club using the pitch for two hours on a Tuesday evening is unlikely, by itself, to change that—although every premises must still be considered on its own facts.
Nor is the attendance threshold retested when the floodlights come on.
Where a school qualifies because 200 or more people can reasonably be expected to be present in connection with its educational use, a smaller evening booking does not mean the premises have temporarily stopped qualifying.
Once the main duties come into force, the responsible person will need to ensure that appropriate public-protection procedures are in place for all the activities taking place there—including activities being run by somebody else, so far as reasonably practicable.[1]
The Tuesday football session might involve only 40 or 50 people. That does not create a separate threshold for the evening.
So, does that make the hire agreement pointless?
Not at all. It simply gives the agreement a more precise job.
The guidance says the responsible person may ask a hirer to carry out particular public-protection procedures. The hirer should be told what the law requires and exactly what it is expected to do. Those requirements can be written into the hire agreement.[2]
For our Tuesday-night football club, that means answering some very ordinary questions:
A procedure written for eleven o’clock on a school day may not work at eight o’clock in the evening, when reception is closed and the usual members of staff have gone home.
The football club can carry out the agreed procedures. But the responsible person for the school still has to oversee the arrangement and remains responsible for complying with the Act.
Once the duties are in force, if the SIA asks, the responsible person must be able to show that the requirements were clearly explained and that reasonable action was taken to ensure the hirer complied.[2]
The contract is not where statutory responsibility moves.
It is where everyone’s practical jobs are made clear.
Before the duties come into force, take one regular hire and ask a simple question:
Does our agreement merely say that the hirer is responsible, or does it clearly explain what they must actually do?
You can give the football club the keys. You can give its coach specific tasks.
But you cannot use the agreement to appoint a different responsible person under the Act.
The keys move. Responsibility under the Act does not automatically move with them.
Statlog....more than just compliance and premises software.
[1] Home Office, Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act: principal use of premises, published 10 September 2026.
[2] Home Office, Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025: statutory guidance, particularly paragraphs 6.13–6.15.