The short answer is that the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 was built and written to ensure the burden was as low as possible, and it delivers that through one term. Every premises in scope has to put public protection procedures in place so far as is reasonably practicable — no further.

The cost that catches people out is not a purchase. It is time: reading the statutory guidance, working out what is reasonably practicable for your own building, drafting four procedures, exercising them and keeping the records current. That is the honest comparison point for any quote, including ours.

A great many faith leaders have told us they are worried about the cost of complying. It is worth knowing that the legislation was drafted with exactly that concern in view. The whole thing was built and written to ensure the burden was as low as possible.

It does not do that by exempting anybody. It does it by limiting what is asked for, and the limit is written into the duty itself.

Whatever the site — a place of worship or anywhere else — the duty is to put public protection procedures in place so far as is reasonably practicable. That phrase is not decoration. It is the ceiling on what you have to do.

It is also not a size test. It weighs the likely effectiveness of a procedure against the burden of putting it in place, taking account of the nature and use of the premises, its location, its visitor profile, the resources genuinely available and the mitigation already there. Small does not mean less by default, and large does not mean more by default — the assessment is about your site rather than about your scale.

The full test is set out in what “so far as is reasonably practicable” actually means.

It helps to be precise about the object of the spend. A standard tier premises — which is what a place of worship always is, provided it meets the 200-person threshold — is asked for public protection procedures: evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication, as four distinct items.

Public protection measures are a separate, enhanced tier obligation and sit with those premises only. That distinction matters to the cost question because it is the measures side that people picture when they imagine an expensive compliance project.

A procedure is a decision made in advance and written down: who decides, what happens, who does it, how everyone is told. Nothing is submitted to the regulator for approval at standard tier, and the responsible person has to be able to evidence those procedures on inspection.

Chris is direct about where the difficulty actually is. Qualifying what reasonably practicable means for a particular site can be genuinely hard, and that is where the hours go. Set against a quote, the do-it-yourself route is not free — it looks like this:

• Reading the legislation and the statutory guidance published by the Home Office in April 2026, and working out which parts apply to your premises.
• Deciding what is reasonably practicable for your building, and being able to explain the reasoning if you are asked.
• Writing four procedures that reflect your actual site rather than a template with your name at the top.
• Exercising them, and recording that it happened.
• Briefing the people who hold a role, including volunteers, and recording that too.
• Keeping all of it current as people, rotas and the building change.

You will not find an average cost for a place of worship here, and you should treat any figure offered elsewhere carefully. Reasonably practicable is assessed premises by premises, so a sector average describes nobody’s building.

The government’s impact assessment is sometimes quoted as though it set a standard. It does not. It exists as a cost-estimation baseline for the legislation and it is not a compliance standard for any individual premises.

Understanding what is reasonably practicable for your own site is exactly the problem Prova Risk was built to solve. The platform works out what is reasonably practicable for your premises, builds all four public protection procedures around it, holds the training and exercise records, and produces a single compliance document you can put in front of a regulator. £399 per year per site.

Where a faith body is responsible for a number of sites, pricing works differently from single-site pricing — the multi-site page is the place to start. Either way the comparison is against those weeks of somebody’s time, not against zero.

• Martyn’s Law cost: three routes compared
• How much does Martyn’s Law compliance actually cost?
• What “so far as is reasonably practicable” actually means
• Procedures vs measures under Martyn’s Law
• Are places of worship exempt from Martyn’s Law?
• Martyn’s Law for places of worship and faith communities
• Martyn’s Law hub