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Event organisers have an obligation to ensure the safety of punters.

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Event organisers bear a legal responsibility to ensuring the safety of their staff and guests at live events.

Following on from last month's special health and safety investigation, Arjun Aiyar from The Rights Lawyers takes a look at the legal implications facing organisations staging major events for the public.

As those in the business will know, event management is a relatively labour intensive exercise. Whether it's engaging a vendor to set up an exhibition stall, recruiting ushers to show people to their seats at a theatre performance or securing the services of a star to perform at an event, event management is all about bringing people together to produce something that is designed to inform or entertain.

In addition to managing people employed or hired in for an event, the event organiser is also responsible for ensuring the safety of the general public attending that particular event.

In essence, the primary stakeholders involved in staging an event include: the sponsor (or client), the event organiser, the vendors (performer, production crew, etc) and the public.

Each of these parties primarily need to be taken care of by the event organiser and a lack of care shown towards any of them, from a health and safety viewpoint, potentially carries significant legal and financial risk for the event organiser.

As with most creative enterprises, an event is only successful if the various stakeholders buy into a particular concept. In legal terms, this is achieved on the basis whereby the event organiser promises the sponsor that he can produce an event which will appeal to the public and on being funded by such a sponsor, the event organiser promises the vendors that he will pay them to produce the event.

An event organiser should not only take into consideration the financial and practical issues associated with putting on a show but also the health and safety aspects and the risks carried with it.

Many inexperienced event organisers working with artists of note for the first time will baulk at the voluminous size of technical rider that their production crew and management insist be delivered.

It's interesting to note that in most cases, the vast majority of the terms and conditions laid out by stars prior to performing at a particular venue relate directly to health and safety issues.

Usually in such cases, event organisers are forced to adopt health and safety standards which are fairly onerous.

Our advice is that not only should they abide by the requests of a touring artist's production crew, they should adopt an all-encompassing safety regime which they can implement for future events based on the demands received from these performers.

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