Question 1

What is a Safety Advisory Group?

Accepted Answer

A Safety Advisory Group, usually shortened to SAG, is a multi-agency group convened by a local authority to advise event organisers on public safety. Membership typically includes the council’s events and licensing teams, the police, the fire and rescue service, the ambulance service and highways, with others attending depending on the event. SAGs are advisory. They do not licence events and have no statutory power to approve or refuse one. Licensing and any other statutory consents run as separate processes, though a SAG’s view carries real weight with the bodies that do hold those powers.

Question 2

What documents does a Safety Advisory Group ask for?

Accepted Answer

It varies by authority and by the scale of the event, but a typical pack contains an Event Safety Management Plan, risk assessments, site plans, and specialist appendices: crowd management, medical, traffic management, waste, noise, and an emergency or major incident plan. Insurance and contractor competency evidence are usually requested alongside. Most SAGs work from the Purple Guide to Health, Safety and Welfare at Music and Other Events, which is the events industry’s standard reference.

Question 3

What is an Event Safety Management Plan?

Accepted Answer

The Event Safety Management Plan, or ESMP, is the master document. It describes the event, the site, the audience, the management structure and the safety arrangements, and it points to the specialist appendices that cover each area in detail. Because the appendices are usually written by different suppliers at different times, the ESMP and the documents beneath it are where contradictions most often appear.

Question 4

Why do event safety documents contradict each other?

Accepted Answer

Because no single person writes them. A crowd management plan comes from one contractor, the medical plan from another, the traffic plan from a third, and the ESMP from the organiser. Each is drafted at a different moment, and figures move: capacity is revised, gates shift, dates slip. Documents also get reused year to year, so last year’s dates and figures survive into this year’s pack. None of this is negligence. It is what happens when twenty documents are assembled under deadline.

Question 5

What is a document consistency check?

Accepted Answer

It is a cross-check of every figure and stated policy against every other document in the pack, so that disagreements surface before a reader finds them. Capacity in the crowd management plan against capacity everywhere else. Gate times in the traffic plan against gate times in the ESMP. Named contacts, dates, and the year on the cover. SAG Portal’s Document Checker does this and cites every finding to a document and page, so you can go straight to the line that needs changing.

Question 6

How do I share event safety documents with a SAG securely?

Accepted Answer

Email attachments are the common default and the weakest option: version confusion, size limits, and copies scattered across inboxes you do not control. A secure portal gives every reader one link to the current pack, and lets you withdraw access afterwards. SAG Portal encrypts each document before it reaches the host, so it can only be read in the browser of someone holding the password. The portal itself sits at an unlisted address that search engines are told to ignore.

Question 7

Can I just email the documents instead?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and plenty of organisers do. The difficulty is that a SAG member reading twenty attachments has no way to search across them, no way to know they hold the latest version, and no easy way to jump from the ESMP to the appendix it references. A portal solves the reader’s problem rather than the sender’s, which is usually the argument that persuades a SAG chair.

Question 8

When should I submit to the SAG?

Accepted Answer

Timescales are set locally and differ considerably, so check with the authority hosting your event early. Larger events are commonly discussed at SAG meetings months ahead, with documents expected several weeks before the meeting rather than days. The practical answer: find out the meeting date first, then work backwards. Late paperwork is the most common reason a SAG asks to see an organiser again.

Question 9

What does SAG Portal cost?

Accepted Answer

A free check on any pack, once per event, returns an issue count and a sample of findings. An Event Pass is £79 for one event of up to 15 documents, a Festival Pass £199 for one event with any number of documents and large-format site plans, and Agency is £149 a month for unlimited events and team seats. No VAT is added. Agency works out cheaper above roughly nine events a year.

Question 10

Is it secure enough for a sensitive pack?

Accepted Answer

Documents are encrypted with AES-256 before they leave your side and are only decrypted in the reader’s browser, using the portal password as the key. Anyone inspecting the page source, including us, sees scrambled text rather than your plans. We hold only what you upload. No analytics run against your documents, and nothing receives them except the infrastructure that runs the check, which our privacy page names.

Spot the contradictions and errors in your documentation before SAG members do.

Check that the details of every single document align, in seconds.

Upload everything. We publish it when it’s perfect.

One link. One password. The whole pack.

Secure by architecture, not by promise.

Pay per event, or subscribe with Agency if you run several

Safety Advisory Groups, and the paperwork they read