event-licence

---
name: event-licence
description: Produces one dated permission file for a single event: every activity the night involves named against the Licensing Act, each one marked as covered by your premises licence or not, the Temporary Event Notice deadline where one is needed, the separate music copyright licence, the gambling position on any raffle or quiz, the door supervision question, and a numbered list of what must be settled before tickets go on sale. Use before you advertise a date, and again if the plan changes.
---

# Know what you need before you sell a single ticket

You give this the event as you intend to run it, your premises licence, and the dates. You get back one dated file: each activity the night involves named against the Licensing Act 2003, each one marked covered, outside hours or not covered, the route and the deadline for anything not covered, the separate music copyright licence recorded, the gambling position on any prize element, the door supervision question answered or sent on, and a numbered list of what is unresolved ranked by what stops you selling tickets. It does not tell you that you are licensed. It tells you what your licence says, what the published rules say, and exactly which question belongs to your licensing officer.

## What it does

1. **List every activity the night actually involves and name each one against the Act, because the categories are narrower than they sound.** Section 1 of the Licensing Act 2003 gives four licensable activities: "(a) the sale by retail of alcohol, (b) the supply of alcohol by or on behalf of a club to, or to the order of, a member of the club, (c) the provision of regulated entertainment, and (d) the provision of late night refreshment". Regulated entertainment is defined in Schedule 1 and is a closed list: plays, films, indoor sporting events, boxing or wrestling entertainment, live music, recorded music, dance, and entertainment of a similar description to music or dance, in each case provided to an audience for the purpose of entertaining them. Write your night out activity by activity with times: a DJ from nine, a quiz from eight, food until eleven, a bar until midnight. A quiz on its own is not on the list. A quiz with a band is.

2. **Read your own premises licence against that list and mark each activity covered, outside hours, or not covered at all.** For each activity, copy the permitted hours from the licence, put the event's proposed hours beside them, and write the verdict. Then copy every condition attached to the licence that touches any of these activities, verbatim, including conditions about door supervision, capacity, outside areas, last entry and noise. Owners remember the headline hours and forget the conditions, and it is a condition rather than an hour that most often turns out to be the problem, because a condition can require something at your cost with four weeks' notice.

3. **Work the music question properly, because the deregulation is real but it is narrow and it can be switched off.** Paragraph 12A of Schedule 1 takes live music and recorded music out of regulated entertainment where the conditions in section 177A are met, and section 177A requires premises licensed for the on-supply of alcohol and open for that purpose, an amplified audience "of no more than 500 persons", and music "between 8am and 11pm on the same day". GOV.UK's plain version is "it takes place between 8AM and 11PM; and it takes place at an alcohol on-licensed premises; and the audience is no more than 500 people". Two things to record. The 11pm edge, because a band finishing at 11.20pm is outside it entirely. And whether your licence carries a music condition reimposed by the licensing authority at a review, because section 177A allows exactly that and such a condition survives the exemption. Paragraph 12B covers unlicensed workplaces on the same numbers, which is the route for an office party in a venue that is not alcohol-licensed.

4. **Check the late night refreshment line, because hot food after eleven is a licensable activity and nobody expects it to be.** GOV.UK describes late night refreshment as "the sale of hot food or drink to the public...between 11pm and 5am". A midnight bacon roll at a New Year's party, hot chocolate handed out at a late Christmas market, a kitchen kept open for a club night: all of those are the fourth licensable activity, and a premises licence that authorises alcohol until one o'clock does not necessarily authorise them. Mark it in the table like any other activity, with the time the hot food starts and the time it stops, and check it against the licence rather than against common sense.

5. **For anything not covered, choose the route and put the real deadline in the diary, because the two routes run on completely different clocks.** A Temporary Event Notice is the fast route for a one-off. A variation of the premises licence is the slow route and the permanent one. GOV.UK states a TEN must be given "at least 10 clear working days before your event", with a late TEN possible "5 clear working days before the event (but not earlier than 9 clear working days)", a fee of £21, and a copy to the police and to environmental health. A full variation runs on consultation and advertising periods set by the licensing authority and takes weeks, not days. Count clear working days backwards on a real calendar with bank holidays excluded, write the resulting date, and treat it as the date tickets can safely go on sale, not the date somebody starts thinking about it.

6. **Check the notice fits inside what a Temporary Event Notice can actually do.** Section 100 caps the event period at "not exceeding 168 hours" and requires "the maximum number of persons (being a number less than 500)" present at any one time. GOV.UK puts the headcount as "fewer than 500 people at all times - including staff running the event", which is the part that catches people, because the figure is not the ticket count, it is everybody in the building. A TEN covers selling alcohol, providing entertainment and serving hot food or drink between 11pm and 5am. It cannot cure a capacity problem and it is not a way to run a permanent change one month at a time.

7. **Count the annual allowance before you plan a second one, because the allowance is the constraint people find last.** Section 107 requires the licensing authority to give a counter notice once limits are reached. At the premises: at least 15 temporary event notices in a year, or more than 21 days in the year covered by permitted temporary event periods. For the individual giving the notice: "50 temporary event notices" or "ten late temporary event notices" in a calendar year where they hold a personal licence, and "five temporary event notices" or "two late temporary event notices" where they do not. Record the running totals for the premises and for the named individual as at today's date, with where the figure came from. A venue planning monthly events on notices needs to know in January, not in September.

8. **Record the music copyright licence separately, because it is a different thing from the premises licence and the confusion is near universal.** PPL PRS state that "Permission is needed from the relevant copyright holders - those people who create music - in order to play or perform music in public" and that a business that plays or performs music "will usually need TheMusicLicence", which covers PPL for "the use of recorded music on behalf of record companies and performers" and PRS for Music for "the use of musical compositions and lyrics on behalf of songwriters, composers and publishers". So a venue can be fully licensed under the Licensing Act and still be performing music without permission. Record whether the licence is held, its reference, what it covers, and whether the event's use falls inside it, and get a quote for a ticketed concert before the tickets are priced, because ticketed concerts sit on their own tariff.

9. **Sweep the other permissions, then rank what is unresolved by what stops you selling tickets, and date the file.** Gambling: section 14 of the Gambling Act 2005 makes an arrangement a lottery where "persons are required to pay in order to participate", prizes go to members of a class, and allocation "relies wholly on chance", so any raffle, tombola or draw needs its category settled and, for an incidental lottery, the Gambling Commission's conditions met, including that it be "promoted wholly for a purpose other than that of private gain" and that tickets not be sold "online (which includes social media) or in advance of the event". Door supervision: the Security Industry Authority regulates it as a licensable activity under the Private Security Industry Act 2001, so record the name and licence number of anyone doing it. Counter terrorism: the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 sets a standard tier at "200 or more individuals (including staff)" with an implementation period of "at least 24 months" from 3 April 2025, so it is not yet in force but the threshold is worth knowing now. Then three groups: cannot sell tickets until this is settled, must be settled before the date, and monitor. Every item names the body it is addressed to, an owner and a date, and the file carries its build date and the date each source was read.

## Then it checks

1. Every activity the event involves appears in the table, named against one of the four licensable activities or marked as not licensable, with its own start and finish times, and hot food after 11pm has been considered explicitly rather than assumed absent.
2. Every activity carries the permitted hours copied from the actual premises licence beside the proposed hours, and every condition on that licence touching any of these activities is reproduced verbatim rather than summarised.
3. The music position states the expected audience number, the finish time, whether the premises are licensed for the on-supply of alcohol and open for that purpose, and whether any music condition has been reimposed on a review, with a yes or no to each.
4. Every activity not covered by the premises licence has a named route, either a Temporary Event Notice or a variation, with a real deadline date counted in clear working days and the name of the person who will submit it.
5. The Temporary Event Notice allowance is recorded as running totals for the premises and for the named individual as at today's date, with the source of each figure, and any counter that could not be obtained is on the unresolved list rather than assumed to have headroom.
6. Nothing in the file states that the event is licensed, permitted or compliant, every requirement quoted names its source and the date that source was read, and anything that could not be verified is listed as unverified rather than described.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is. A Temporary Event Notice is given by a named individual and that name goes in the file with their personal licence status.
- Never tell an owner they are licensed, permitted or compliant, and never tell them they do not need a permission. Those are conclusions for the licensing authority, and an owner told "you are fine" by a document stops asking the person who could actually tell them.
- Never carry a licence position forward from a previous event without re-reading the premises licence and the source. Licences are varied, conditions are added at reviews, and a position right in March can be wrong in September.
- Never treat silence as permission. A licensing officer, a police licensing team or an environmental health officer who has not replied has not agreed, and the item stays on the unresolved list with the date it was sent.
- Never record a licence, a certificate or a notice as held unless it has been opened and its dates and reference read. A renewal the owner is sure was done is not a renewal.
- Never advise on whether a particular quiz is skilful enough, whether a raffle is lawful, or whether a member of staff needs an SIA licence. Record the facts, name the regulator, and send the question.
- This output is a working document prepared for the owner's licensing officer, solicitor, environmental health officer and insurer to check before it is relied on. It gathers published requirements, records what the owner holds and names the gaps. It is not legal advice, it is not a licensing decision, and it does not certify compliance with anything.

## Built from
- Licensing Act 2003, section 1, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/section/1, and Schedule 1, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/schedule/1, read 16 September 2026: the four licensable activities and the closed list of regulated entertainment, in step 1.
- Licensing Act 2003, section 4, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/section/4, read 16 September 2026: the four licensing objectives, the frame the file is read against.
- GOV.UK, "Alcohol licensing", https://www.gov.uk/guidance/alcohol-licensing, no publication date shown on the page, read 16 September 2026: late night refreshment as hot food or drink sold to the public between 11pm and 5am, in step 4.
- Licensing Act 2003, section 177A, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/section/177A, with Schedule 1 paragraphs 12A, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/schedule/1/paragraph/12A, and 12B, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/schedule/1/paragraph/12B, read 16 September 2026: the 500 person and 8am to 11pm conditions, the reimposition of conditions on a review, and the workplace route, all in step 3.
- GOV.UK, "Entertainment licensing changes under the Live Music Act", https://www.gov.uk/entertainment-licensing-changes-under-the-live-music-act, no publication date shown on the page, read 16 September 2026: the plain wording of the deregulated test in step 3.
- GOV.UK, "Temporary Events Notice", https://www.gov.uk/temporary-events-notice, no publication date shown on the page, read 16 September 2026: the 10 clear working days, the late TEN window, the £21 fee, the copies to police and environmental health, and the "fewer than 500 people at all times" figure including staff, in steps 5 and 6.
- Licensing Act 2003, sections 100, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/section/100, and 107, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/section/107, read 16 September 2026: the 168 hour period and under-500 maximum in step 6, and the 15 notice, 21 day, 50, 10, 5 and 2 counters in step 7.
- PPL PRS Ltd, "What is TheMusicLicence", https://pplprs.co.uk/themusiclicence/, and "Music Licence Cost", https://pplprs.co.uk/themusiclicence/music-licence-cost/, no publication dates shown on the pages, read 16 September 2026: the permission requirement and the PPL and PRS split, in step 8.
- Gambling Act 2005, section 14, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/19/section/14, read 16 September 2026, with Gambling Commission, "How to run a fundraiser with lotteries or raffles at events", https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/public-and-players/guide/page/how-to-run-a-fundraiser-with-lotteries-or-raffles-at-events, and "Free draws and prize competitions", https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/public-and-players/guide/page/free-draws-and-prize-competitions, no publication dates shown on the pages, read 16 September 2026: the lottery definition and the incidental lottery conditions in step 9.
- Security Industry Authority, "About us", https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/security-industry-authority/about, no publication date shown on the page, with the Private Security Industry Act 2001, Schedule 2, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/12/schedule/2, both read 16 September 2026: door supervision as a licensable activity in step 9.
- Home Office, "Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025: Overarching Factsheet", https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/terrorism-protection-of-premises-act-2025-factsheets/terrorism-protection-of-premises-act-2025-overarching-factsheet, page updated 24 July 2026, read 16 September 2026: the 200 and 800 thresholds, the implementation period of at least 24 months from 3 April 2025, and the SIA as regulator, in step 9.

# event-licence

## You are given
The event as the owner intends to run it: name, date, room or rooms, and every activity with its own start and finish time, including the bar, any music live or recorded, any DJ, any quiz or game, any film, any dancing, any indoor sport, any hot food and the time it stops, and the expected number of people in the building including staff. The premises licence for the venue, as a document or typed-out extracts, giving the permitted hours for each licensable activity, the capacity, and every condition on the licence in full. The venue's alcohol licensing position: whether it is licensed for the supply of alcohol for consumption on the premises, and whether it will be open for that purpose during the music. The running totals of temporary event notices and permitted temporary event days already used at these premises in the current calendar year, and the totals already used by the individual who would give any new notice, with whether that individual holds a personal licence and their name. The music copyright licence details if held: provider, reference, what it covers, renewal date. Details of any raffle, tombola, draw, quiz or prize element, with how entry is paid for, how winners are chosen, where tickets would be sold and who the proceeds go to. The name and SIA licence number of any door supervisor. And the judgements already made by Claude and supplied to you: for each activity, which licensable activity it is or that it is not licensable; whether it is covered, outside hours or not covered; the route chosen for anything not covered; the deadline date; and the category of any prize element.

## Produce
Write into a `./event-licence-output/` folder:

1. `activities.csv` with these columns in this order: `activity_ref`, `activity_description_verbatim`, `start_time_24h`, `finish_time_24h`, `licensable_activity_supplied`, `permitted_hours_on_licence`, `verdict_supplied`, `route_supplied`, `deadline_date`, `submitted_by_name`. `activity_ref` is A001 upward. `licensable_activity_supplied` is exactly one of `sale by retail of alcohol`, `supply of alcohol by a club`, `regulated entertainment`, `late night refreshment`, `not licensable`. `verdict_supplied` is exactly one of `covered`, `outside hours`, `not covered`. `route_supplied` is exactly one of `none needed`, `temporary event notice`, `variation`, `not decided`.
2. `licence-conditions.csv` with columns: `condition_ref`, `condition_verbatim`, `activity_refs_affected`, `imposed_on_review`, `action_required`, `action_owner`, `action_deadline`. Every condition on the premises licence gets a row, reproduced in full and never summarised.
3. `music-position.csv` with columns: `question`, `answer`, `source`. Rows, in this order and no others: `premises licensed for on-supply of alcohol`; `premises open for that purpose during the music`; `music is amplified`; `expected audience number`; `audience 500 or fewer`; `music starts at or after 0800`; `music finishes at or before 2300`; `music condition reimposed on a review`; `exemption relied on`. Each answer is `yes`, `no`, a number, or `not supplied`.
4. `ten-allowance.csv` with columns: `counter`, `limit`, `used_this_year`, `remaining`, `as_at_date`, `source_of_used_figure`. Rows, in this order: `notices at these premises` limit 15; `permitted temporary event days at these premises` limit 21; `notices by this individual` limit 50 where a personal licence is held and 5 where it is not; `late notices by this individual` limit 10 where a personal licence is held and 2 where it is not. A counter with no supplied figure is written `not supplied` and listed in `gaps.md`.
5. `ten-check.csv` with columns: `check`, `value`, `within_limit`. Rows: `event period in hours` against 168; `maximum persons present including staff` against 500; `clear working days before the event at the intended submission date`; `activities covered by the notice`; `fee_gbp`; `copy to police sent`; `copy to environmental health sent`. `within_limit` is `yes`, `no` or `not supplied`.
6. `other-permissions.csv` with columns: `permission`, `applies`, `held`, `reference`, `expiry_or_renewal_date`, `addressed_to`, `status`. Rows for at least: `music copyright licence`, `gambling position on any prize element`, `door supervision`, `counter terrorism standard tier threshold`. `status` is exactly one of `in place`, `outstanding`, `question sent`, `not applicable`.
7. `prize-elements.csv` with columns: `element_description_verbatim`, `category_supplied`, `payment_required_to_enter`, `chance_or_skill`, `tickets_sold_in_advance_or_online`, `proceeds_to`, `costs_from_proceeds_gbp`, `prizes_from_proceeds_gbp`, `condition_relied_on`. `category_supplied` is exactly one of `lottery`, `incidental lottery`, `prize competition`, `free draw`, `no prize element` and is copied from the judgement supplied.
8. `unresolved.md` - three headed groups in this order: `cannot sell tickets until this is settled`, `must be settled before the event date`, `monitor`. Every item names what it is, who or which body it is addressed to, a named owner, a date, and the date any question was sent. Items are placed into groups from the judgement supplied and never reordered here.
9. `gaps.md` - a numbered list of: any activity with no licensable activity supplied; any activity with `verdict_supplied` of `not covered` and `route_supplied` of `not decided`; any route with no deadline date; any temporary event notice counter not supplied; any licence condition with no action owner where an action is required; a music position row answered `not supplied`; any prize element with no category supplied; any door supervision row with no licence number; and any source with no read date.

## Rules
- Codex tabulates, counts, cross-checks and records. It never decides which licensable activity an event falls under, never decides whether the premises licence covers it, never chooses between a notice and a variation, never decides a gambling category, and never states that anything is licensed, permitted or compliant. Those judgements arrive with the input.
- Never write the words licensed, permitted, compliant, lawful or allowed as a conclusion about this event in any file. Record what the licence says and what the supplied judgement says, and nothing more.
- Never invent a permitted hour, a capacity, a condition, a counter total, a reference number or a date. A missing value is written as `not supplied` and listed in `gaps.md`, and any derived figure depending on it is left blank.
- Never summarise, shorten or tidy a licence condition. Reproduce it in full, exactly as supplied, including its punctuation and capitalisation.
- Clear working day counts are counted, not estimated: count backwards from the event date excluding weekends and the England and Wales bank holidays supplied, and write the resulting calendar date.
- Never treat an unanswered question as settled. An item with a question sent and no reply stays in `unresolved.md` with the date it was sent.
- Every file carries the date it was built, and every source carries the date it was read. A source with no read date is flagged.
- Dates are DD Month YYYY. Times are 24 hour with a leading zero. Money is in GBP with the pound sign. British English throughout.
- No em dash characters in any file you write. Use a comma, a full stop or the word "and". A supplied line containing one is recorded verbatim and flagged in `gaps.md`.
- Every file ends with this line: this is a working document prepared for the owner's licensing officer, solicitor, environmental health officer and insurer to check before it is relied on. It is not legal advice, it is not a licensing decision and it does not certify compliance with anything.

## Return
The absolute path of each file written and the row count of each CSV. The number of activities and the count by `verdict_supplied` and by `route_supplied`. Every activity marked `not covered`, named with its route and deadline date. The earliest deadline date in the file, which is the date that governs when tickets can safely go on sale. The full contents of `music-position.csv` as a list of question and answer pairs. The four temporary event notice counters with their remaining figures or the words `not supplied`. Every row of `ten-check.csv` with its `within_limit` value. The count of licence conditions recorded and how many require an action, naming any with no owner. The status of each row in `other-permissions.csv`. The number of items in each of the three groups in `unresolved.md`. The `gaps.md` item count.