Standard tier duties centre on four public protection procedures. They are not documents for their own sake: the point is that people in the building know what to do, and the procedures are how that knowledge gets decided and shared.
Evacuation
Getting people out of the premises.
This is the one most venues have already, in the form of a fire evacuation plan. It should cover the exits by name, the route to each, who checks which areas before leaving, where everyone assembles, and whether that assembly point is far enough from the building.
What a fire plan often misses is what changes during a private hire, when the people who wrote the plan are not on site and the person in charge is a wedding organiser who has never been in the building before.
Invacuation
Bringing people into the premises, or moving them to a safer part of it, when the danger is outside.
This is the procedure with no fire safety equivalent, and it is the one most venues have never considered. A fire plan says leave the building. If the threat is in the car park, leaving is exactly wrong.
The practical questions: which internal spaces can hold your numbers, how people get to them without passing windows or external doors, how the doors are held shut, and who gives the instruction. For a single-storey hall with one main room, the honest answer may be that invacuation means staying put, drawing curtains and holding the doors. That is a legitimate procedure if it is what the building allows.
Lockdown
Securing the premises to stop someone entering.
The questions are which doors lock from the inside, who holds keys, whether those people are on site at weekends, and how long it takes one person to do it.
Many older community buildings have very little that locks from the inside. Standard tier duties do not require you to install anything, so the right response is not to buy locks but to describe accurately what can be secured and what cannot. A procedure claiming a capability the building does not have is worse than none, because people will rely on it.
Communication
Alerting people quickly and clearly.
Three parts: the words used, who is authorised to say them, and the method. Most community venues have no PA system, so the method is usually a named person moving through the building. Plain wording matters more than code words, which people forget under pressure.
It also covers how you contact the emergency services, who does it, and what information they will want.
How the four fit together
The four are not a sequence. They are four responses to different situations, and the hard part is deciding which one applies. Communication runs through all of them, because none of the other three works if nobody is told which one is happening.
In practice a short procedure that everyone has read beats a long one that sits in a folder. The guidance expects proportionate responses: a village hall is not expected to respond like a stadium.
Testing them
Standard tier does not mandate drills. But a procedure nobody has walked through is a guess. A walkthrough tends to find the things no amount of writing would: the fire door that sticks, the gate that is padlocked and nobody knows who has the key, the assembly point that is directly outside the main entrance.
Whatever you decide, record what you did and what you found. That record is worth more than the procedure itself.
Making sure people know
The duty is not satisfied by writing the procedures. People at the premises have to be aware of them and know what to do. That includes volunteers, weekend cover, casual staff and regular hirers, and it has to stay current as people join and leave.