Under the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, places of worship sit in the standard tier regardless of how many people they can hold. A cathedral and a village chapel have the same duties.
Why the tier is fixed
For most premises the tier is set by capacity: 200 to 799 is standard, 800 or more is enhanced. Places of worship are treated as standard tier whatever their numbers, in recognition of the fact that they are open, publicly accessible buildings usually run with limited resources.
This is helpful. It means a large church that would otherwise face enhanced tier duties, including a documented assessment sent to the regulator and protective measures, instead has the lighter set: the four procedures and making sure people know them.
Are small churches in scope at all?
The 200 threshold still determines whether the Act applies at all. A chapel that never has 200 people present is out of scope.
The figure to check is your peak, not your average Sunday. Carol services, weddings, funerals, harvest festivals and civic services regularly bring numbers well above normal attendance, and the count includes clergy, servers, choir, volunteers and visiting musicians.
Historic buildings
Many places of worship are listed. Trustees and PCCs often assume this makes compliance harder or more expensive.
It should not. Standard tier duties do not require physical alterations, so nothing here demands faculty permission or works to the fabric. The duties are about deciding what people would do and making sure they know it.
The open door
A church that is open during the day for private prayer presents a genuine difficulty for lockdown, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. The honest procedure describes what is actually possible: who is present, what they can secure, which spaces can be closed off, and what the realistic response is when the answer is that the building cannot be locked down by one volunteer.
The guidance is explicit that duties apply so far as is reasonably practicable. A small congregation with two volunteers on site is not expected to respond like a stadium.
Who needs to know
Clergy, wardens, sidespeople, vergers, musicians, flower guild, the people who run the toddler group, and anyone hiring the church hall. That last group is often the largest and the least connected to whoever wrote the procedures.
Church halls are separate premises
If your church hall is a distinct building with its own use, assess it in its own right. A hall hired out for parties and classes may be in scope on its own terms, and it will often have a higher peak capacity than the church itself.
Where a diocese is involved
Responsibility depends on who controls the premises. In the Church of England that is usually the PCC at parish level rather than the diocese, though dioceses are increasingly coordinating guidance and templates across their parishes. If your diocese is providing a framework, use it: consistency across a large number of buildings is worth more than each parish inventing its own wording.