Working with Local Authorities

We work with local authorities and councils on the events they run, the events they license, and the spaces they own.

We have been doing it since 2012, from Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann to county shows, parades to city centre festivals.

We understand the three roles in events that a council does at once, because we have experience of all three of them.

We are as comfortable and adept at assessing applications as we are writing them.

Who we work with

  • Arts Officers
  • Events and Festival Officers
  • Tourism Officers
  • Community and Culture Officers
  • Night-Time Economy Advisors
  • Local Sports Partnership staff
  • Roads and Traffic Department
  • Fire Officers and Chief Fire Officers
  • Emergency Management Officers
  • Planning and Licensing staff
  • Directors of Services and Senior Executive Officers
  • Procurement teams

If the responsibility for the events being safe has landed on your desk, then we can definitely help you.

What we can do

  • Event Safety Standards for your whole events programme
  • Annual programme Risk Profiling and Tiering
  • Independent ‘Competent Person’ appointment
  • Event (Safety) Management Plans
  • Method Statements, Risk Assessments and Emergency Response Plans
  • Capacity assessments for your venues and spaces
  • Site suitability assessments
  • Parade route Crowd Safety and dispersal planning
  • Oversight of pyrotechnics, laser and SFX safety
  • Post-event debrief and annual learning reports
  • Independent technical assessment of licence applications
  • Support for pre-application consultations
  • Review of third-party Event Management Plans
  • Guidance notes and templates you can publish
  • Transport, pedestrian movement and park and ride planning
  • PSCS and PSDP duties for event build and de-rig
  • Event Controllers, Safety Officers and Safety Advisors
  • Show Stop and Adverse Weather procedures
  • Multi-agency tabletop exercise design & delivery
  • Mass participation runs, cycles and open water events

Outdoor Event Licensing

Owing to Part XVI of the 2000 Act, Part 16 of S.I. 600/2001 as amended, and subsequent Statutory Instruments, a promoter cannot lodge an outdoor events licence application until a pre-application consultation has taken place with you. Applications are lodged at least thirteen weeks out (soon to be further out).

This has moved a significant amount of technical assessment work forward in the calendar and onto council staff.

We act as independent technical assessor for authorities on that work.

We read the Event Management Plan, the Risk Assessments, the capacity and flow calculations, the traffic management proposals and the emergency arrangements, and we produce a report for you on what we find.

Sometimes we are assessing the applications FOR you, while other times we are bringing forward applications TO you on behalf of clients. That needs some management.

See our Independence and Conflict of Interest Protocol below.

Independence

We work for Local Authorities and we work for promoters / event organisers.

We operate a written Independence and Conflict of Interest Protocol.

  • Separate teams. No individual works on both engagements. A named director, ordinarily the Strategic Director, is accountable for the separation.
  • Separate systems. Each engagement sits in its own workspace within our Digital Operations environment, with access restricted by team.
  • Separate information. No documents, data, drawings or commercially sensitive information pass between the two engagements. That obligation survives the end of the engagement and is not time-limited.

The core of it is simple.

  • We will not act for the applicant and for the consenting authority on the same event.
  • Before we accept any authority-side assessment work we check our engagement register for the area and tell you what we find, including where the answer is inconvenient for us.
  • Where we do hold other work in your area, we separate the teams, separate the systems and separate the information, and we put that in writing at the outset.

It has not been an issue, but we think it is best to have it sorted.

Training built for council teams

We developed the world’s first Professional Diploma in Risk and Safety Management for Crowds and Events.

We deliver accredited IOSH and NEBOSH programmes and build bespoke courses from scratch.

And we build courses specifically for the people who have to judge someone else’s safety plan.

For officers who assess

  • Assessing Event Safety Documentation
  • Outdoor Event Licensing in Practice
  • Crowd Safety for non-safety officers

For officers who organise

  • Professional Diploma in Risk and Safety Management for Crowds and Events
  • IOSH Managing Safely (for Events)
  • IOSH Working Safely (for Events)
  • Making Decisions in Event Control in a Crisis
  • Showstop Procedures

For the groups you fund

  • Community festival organiser training
  • Steward and volunteer briefing programmes

We deliver in-house, in your own offices, and we are happy to run a course for two or three neighbouring authorities sharing a cohort and splitting the cost. Those tend to be the best sessions we run.

An Arts Officer who has already worked out how to steward a parade route will teach the room more in ten minutes than we will in an hour, and everyone leaves with a counterpart in the next county who has solved the problem they are about to meet.

We develop systems that can help you

Do you have a way of tracking and collating what happens across all your events annually?

Our Digital Operations team builds the systems we use ourselves, and we deploy them for clients.

For a local authority running a full annual calendar, that means:

  • incident and observation reporting that works the same way at every event
  • a portal where contractors and third-party organisers submit the relevant documentation
  • Method Statements and Risk Assessments, with chasing handled automatically through the system
  • a dashboard that shows an Events Officer what is outstanding this week and a Director of Services what happened across the year i.e. real-time insights as well as comprehensive, data-driven reporting

It is the difference between forty separate events and one managed programme.