Generating and adopting a procedure pack

A procedure pack is four public-protection procedures written around the premises profile you filled in: evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication. They follow the four categories the statutory guidance is built around, in original wording.

Generating one

Open the premises, go to Procedures, and generate. It takes a moment and produces version 1. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is published — the pack exists in your organisation's records.

If the profile is thin, the pack says so in the places it cannot fill: an evacuation procedure with no exits recorded tells you to add them to the profile and regenerate, rather than inventing a route through a building it has never seen. That is deliberate — a plausible invented exit is worse than an obvious gap.

Read it before you adopt it

This is the step that matters and the one most likely to be skipped. Read the pack the way somebody who has to follow it at short notice would read it, and ask:

• Is the assembly point actually safe and reachable? A war memorial across a busy road is a fine landmark and a poor assembly point.
• Can everyone use the exits named? Including somebody using a wheelchair, and somebody unfamiliar with the building.
• Are the people named still the right people, and are the numbers right?
• Does the lockdown procedure match the doors you actually have? If nothing locks from the inside, the procedure has to say what you do instead.
• Would somebody who has never been here understand it? They are the reader it is written for.

Change the profile where the pack is wrong and regenerate. Where the wording itself needs to differ, edit the downloaded document — it is yours to adapt, and the licence in the Service Schedule says so.

Downloading

Two formats, the same content:

• Word (.docx) — for editing, and for anyone who wants to fold it into their own document set.
• PDF — for circulating, printing and putting in the folder by the door.

Both carry the same footer line on every page. Please leave it there: it is what tells the next reader that the document is a template somebody adopted, rather than advice somebody bought.

Versions

Regenerating makes a new version and keeps the old ones. That matters more than it sounds: if somebody asks what your procedures said when the trustees adopted them in March, you can show them, rather than showing them today's document and asking them to take your word for it.

Version history, under the pack, lists every version with the date it was generated and the date it was replaced. The current version, and any version that was in force at some point in the last 2 years, has its own PDF and Word links. An older one is still kept in the record, but it is no longer offered for download.

Regenerate whenever the building changes, the key holders change, or an annual review turns something up.

Adopting it

Adoption is a decision by the responsible person — the trustees, the management committee, the PCC, whoever is actually in control of the premises. The product cannot make it for you.

What it can do is keep the record that you made it. Record a decision against the premises saying who adopted it, when, who was in the room and what was weighed — see Keeping evidence. That entry, and the version of the pack it refers to, is the thing you would show somebody.

Is any of this required?

At standard tier, no. The Act asks you to notify the SIA and to have public-protection procedures in place so far as is reasonably practicable. It does not require you to write them down, and it does not require the records this product keeps. Writing them down is good practice — not required at standard tier.

Most venues do it anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with the regulator: a procedure that lives only in the caretaker's head leaves with the caretaker.

If your premises is likely in the enhanced tier — 800 or more individuals reasonably expected — the duties are more demanding than this kit is built for. Seek professional advice.

Places of worship, and early years, school and further-education premises, are the exception: they stay in the standard tier however many people may be present, so the paragraphs above apply to them at any size.