Your beer garden counts.
Yes. When you are working out how many people you can reasonably expect on your site from time to time, you have to include not only your inside seated area but any outside space you have as well. The beer garden is part of the premises.
That matters because the outside space is usually where the number moves. A pub can sit well under the 200-person threshold indoors and clear it comfortably on an afternoon when the garden is full.
Which hospitality premises are covered
Hospitality comes into scope of the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 on the same two-part test as every other sector. The premises has to be used for a purpose listed in Schedule 1 of the Act, and 200 or more individuals have to be reasonably expected on site from time to time.
Pubs, bars, restaurants, hotels and event venues are ordinary hospitality uses, so for most operators the first part of the test is straightforward and the whole question turns on the second. That is where the counting starts, and where the outside space comes in.
Your outside space is part of the premises
This is the point publicans most often get wrong, and it is an easy mistake to make. The instinct is to picture the room: tables, covers, the number of people you can seat and serve indoors.
The count is the whole site, inside and out. Beer gardens, terraces, yards, covered smoking areas, the space with the picnic benches on it. If you operate it and people are on it, it goes into the same total as the lounge bar.
For a site with a large garden that can change the answer entirely, because outside space tends to absorb far more people than the equivalent floor area indoors.
The big fixture is the number to use
The threshold is not a description of an average day. It is 200 or more individuals reasonably expected on site from time to time, and those last words are doing the work.
For a pub, the clearest example is a major sporting fixture. Screens on in the garden during a World Cup, a warm evening, and you are getting a lot more people than you normally would. That still counts towards what you can reasonably expect from time to time.
It does not stop counting because it only happens a handful of times a year. If you can foresee it, it is part of the picture — and if that peak takes you above 200, you are very much in scope of the legislation. The method for working the peak out is a separate question, and a more practical one.
Everyone on site, including your own team
The 200 is not a customer count. It is everyone reasonably expected to be on the site: customers, the bar team, kitchen staff, floor and cellar staff, door staff if you use them, contractors in for the day, and anyone volunteering at an event.
On a busy fixture that is a meaningful addition to the figure, and it is the part most often left out of the back-of-an-envelope sum.
It is expected attendance, not capacity
One distinction is worth holding onto from the start. The test is the number of people you reasonably expect on the site, not the number the building could physically hold. A fire capacity figure is not the scope test, and it will usually give you the wrong answer — not least because it does not describe your garden at all.
Nor are you expected to have counted precisely. The duty is to make a reasonable estimate from what you already know. Our Am I in Scope? tool asks for the attendance you expect and returns your scope position from it.
What being in scope actually means for a pub
It means four public protection procedures in place so far as is reasonably practicable — evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication, as four distinct items. That standard is not a size test: it weighs how effective a procedure is likely to be 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 you have and the mitigation already there.
Nothing is submitted to the regulator for approval at standard tier, but you have to be able to evidence those procedures if you are inspected. Starting this year means you set your own pace and exercise them properly before compliance is expected in April 2027.
Prova Risk works out what is reasonably practicable for your site, builds all four 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.
