Conferences and Events: 11 Duties Firms Miss
Technology, professional and education organisations run a great deal of their business through events. Product launches, user conferences, exhibition stands, client seminars, partner summits, open days, team offsites.
These are organised by marketing, events or business development teams working to a deadline, and they involve work that would receive careful attention if it happened in the office: lifting, working at height, electrical installation, long days, unfamiliar buildings and large numbers of people who are not employees.
Eleven duties, split between attending somebody else's event and running your own.
1. The duty follows your people to the venue
The foundation, and it settles most arguments about whose problem this is.
An employer's duty to its employees is not confined to premises it controls, and section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires an employer to conduct its undertaking so that persons not in its employment are not exposed to risk.
Running or attending an event is conducting your undertaking. The venue has its own duties; yours do not transfer to it.
2. Attending: what to establish before you go
For staff attending somebody else's conference or exhibiting at a show, the organiser and venue hold a great deal.
What your organisation should establish in advance is short: the venue's emergency arrangements and where the assembly point is, who your people report a problem to, what the organiser requires of exhibitors, and whether anything about the activity or venue creates a risk your people are not used to.
Regulation 11 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires employers sharing a workplace to cooperate and coordinate, which is the basis for expecting that information.
3. Stand build and installation is the real work
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The part treated as logistics and assessed as nothing.
Building and dismantling an exhibition stand involves manual handling of heavy and awkward items, work at height fitting signage and lighting, electrical installation, and doing all of it in a hall full of other people doing the same, frequently to a tight schedule and often late at night.
Regulation 4 of the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 and regulation 6 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 both apply exactly as they would anywhere else.
The practical answer for most organisations is to use a contractor who does this professionally, and to stop marketing staff improvising with a borrowed stepladder at eleven at night.
4. Long days, travel and alcohol
The exposure that affects the most people and is never written down.
A typical show day starts with an early journey, runs eight or ten hours standing on a hard floor, continues into client entertainment, and ends with a late drive or a hotel. Repeat for three days.
Fatigue, the drive home at the end, and alcohol at evening functions are all foreseeable. Two controls cost nothing: a stated position on driving after evening events, and rota cover so nobody works every hour of every day.
5. Hosting changes your position entirely
Once your organisation is the organiser, you are no longer a guest.
You are responsible for the event as your undertaking: the programme, the attendees you invited, the contractors you engaged, and the coordination between them and the venue. The venue remains responsible for its building.
The most useful single step is to write down, before the event, which of you is doing what: who controls the room layout, who briefs attendees, whose staff sweep which areas in an evacuation, and who makes the decision to stop.
6. Delegates and guests are non-employees
Section 3 again, and it is the reason hosting is a heavier duty than attending.
Your attendees, speakers, sponsors and their guests are people affected by your undertaking. That reaches the ordinary things: capacity, circulation, trailing cables from AV, staging and platform edges, food allergen information, and accessibility for anybody who needs it.
Ask about access and assistance needs at registration rather than on the day. It is both a safety and a reasonable adjustments question.
7. Contractors: AV, catering, stand builders, security
Every event brings in people you do not employ to do work you have specified.
The discipline is the one applied to contractors anywhere: know what they will do, establish they are competent, get their arrangements in advance, tell them what they need to know about the venue and the event, and coordinate between them where their work overlaps.
Overlap is the specific risk at events. Rigging above while others set up below, catering moving through the same doors as delivery, and everything happening at once on build day.
8. Emergency arrangements in an unfamiliar building
The duty that most event plans cover thinnest.
Article 15 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires procedures for serious and imminent danger and enough competent people nominated to implement evacuation.
For an event this means somebody on your team knows the venue's procedure, your staff know their role in it, attendees are told at the start where the exits are, and there is a plan for anybody who would need assistance to leave. A room full of people who have never been in the building before will not self-evacuate efficiently.
9. Offsites and away days
A category organisations treat as not-work, which it is.
A team offsite, an away day or an incentive trip is organised by the employer, attended in the course of employment and frequently includes activities nobody would approve at a client site: outdoor pursuits, watersports, karting, high ropes.
Two things resolve most of it. Use providers who carry their own competence and insurance, and confirm it rather than assume. And make participation genuinely optional, so that somebody with a health condition or a fear of heights does not have to explain themselves publicly.
10. Events with 800 or more attendees
The newest consideration, and it applies to larger conferences.
Under Martyn's Law, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, an event is a qualifying event, always in the enhanced tier, where 800 or more people may be present, the event is open to the public, and access is controlled by checking tickets or taking payment.
The duties commence in spring 2027 rather than now, and organisations running large public conferences should establish whether their events will fall into scope. The regulator's guidance on Martyn's Law sets out the position, and an internal event the public cannot attend is a different matter.
11. Overseas events
The category where a group standard is least likely to work.
Venue and event safety requirements, contractor licensing, stand build rules and permit regimes are national, and major exhibition venues frequently impose their own detailed requirements on exhibitors.
Two practical points. Read the venue's exhibitor manual rather than assuming it mirrors the last one. And where your own staff are travelling, the ordinary travel, health and insurance questions apply alongside the event itself.
The 11, in short
| Duty | Attending | Hosting |
|---|---|---|
| The duty travels | Yes | Yes |
| Establish in advance | Venue arrangements, organiser rules | The full split with the venue |
| Stand build | Use competent contractors | Same, plus coordination |
| Long days and travel | Rota cover, driving position | Same, plus staffing the event |
| Delegates | Not yours | Yours, under section 3 |
| Contractors | The organiser's mostly | Yours to control and coordinate |
| Emergency arrangements | Know the venue's | Own the plan within it |
| Offsites | Employer-organised is work | Provider competence confirmed |
| 800 or more | Not your duty | Possibly a qualifying event |
| Overseas | Local rules and the manual | Same, more so |
Rows three and seven are where injuries actually happen, and row five is where hosting becomes a materially heavier duty than attending.
A short pre-event checklist
Five questions, answerable in a meeting.
Who is doing the physical work, and are they competent to? If the answer is marketing staff, change it.
What has the venue told us, in writing? Emergency procedures, capacity, restrictions.
What have we told our attendees? Exits at the start, allergen information, access arrangements.
Who is in charge on the day, and who can stop it? One named person, known to the team.
What happens if somebody is hurt? First aid provision, who calls, and who reports it afterwards.
Holding event assessments, venue information and contractor records in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits reveal how much event activity sits outside the assessments an organisation holds.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite assesses the activities an organisation actually carries out, which for technology and professional firms includes a programme of events that rarely appears in the risk assessment file. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years.
Our health and safety consultants work extensively with IT and software, legal, insurance and education organisations, all of which run public-facing events as a matter of routine.
Where events run in several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction and venue requires, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current.
If your organisation exhibited this year and nobody assessed the stand build, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
