Total Event Assurance™

From the front barrier to the back truss.

MGH Production provides stewarding, lighting, sound, power and temporary structures for public events. Staffing, turnover, customer volumes, depot locations and assignment figures are withheld from this public summary.

One contract, one control room, one point of accountability

Our proposition is unfashionably simple. The conventional arrangement is to appoint five suppliers: a security company, a lighting company, a sound company, a generator hire firm and a structures contractor. Then, at two o'clock on the morning of the build, the truss cannot be flown until the ballast arrives. The ballast is on a lorry nobody has booked in at the gate, and the five suppliers hold five sincere and incompatible views as to whose fault this is. The organiser, who has a licence to protect and a public to admit in nine hours, is left to arbitrate.

MGH supplies all five disciplines under a single contract, with one production schedule, one insurance position and one telephone number. Where the responsibility sits is never in dispute, because it sits with us. Clients who prefer to appoint us for a single discipline are welcomed and well served; we simply note that the interfaces between trades are where events are lost, and that we would rather own them than argue about them.

What binds the disciplines together on site is GOLDCELL™, our event control room. From doors to clear-site, GOLDCELL holds the radio talkgroups, the CCTV matrix, the counting lines at every ingress point, the weather feed and the medical log in one room, staffed by the Event Manager, the Head of Security and the Production Manager, with police, ambulance and local authority officers alongside them where the event warrants it. A show stop is therefore one decision taken by one person in one place, rather than a negotiation conducted over five radio networks. Our 24-hour Event Control Desk is manned throughout.

The five services

How we work

Every appointment, from a 900-head village fete to the Ashfield Festival, follows the same seven stages. We do not shorten the sequence for small events; we simply spend less time on each stage.

1. Site visit and licensing review. We walk the ground with the organiser, read the premises licence and its conditions, and identify what the licensing authority will want that the organiser has not yet been asked for.
2. Written risk assessment and event management plan. Issued not less than 84 days before the first build day, in the format the Green Guide expects, and revised as the site changes rather than after it has.
3. Safety Advisory Group attendance. Our Event Manager attends the SAG in person and answers for the plan. We have never sent a letter in place of a person.
4. Build. Phased against a published schedule, with lifting operations under a LOLER-compliant plan and every structure signed off by an independent structural engineer before any load is applied.
5. Show. GOLDCELL manned continuously from first ingress to clear-site, with counted occupancy reconciled against the licensed capacity every fifteen minutes.
6. Derig. Conducted in reverse build order, with the site returned to the landowner against a photographic condition schedule agreed beforehand.
7. Post-event debrief. Circulated in writing within 10 working days, to the organiser and to the SAG, and containing what went wrong as well as what did not.

Scale

Crowd flow modelling for licensed capacities above 40,000 is prepared for us by colleagues at the group's defence site, who spend the remainder of the year modelling dispersal for other customers. The mathematics is indifferent to the application, and the barrier plans are the better for it.

Accreditation

MGH Production is an SIA Approved Contractor for door supervision and security guarding, is certificated to ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, works to BS 8901 for sustainable event management, and is a member of the BSIA and of Safecontractor. Certificates, insurance schedules and method statements are supplied with every tender return, and printed copies will be posted by first class post on request.

Next steps

Read what we have already done at Case Studies, which covers the Thameshead Barrier Extension opening, the Northern Union conference at Blackpool and three seasons at Ashfield. Then talk to us: the division is at Unit 7, Bellhouse Park, Dunstable, on +44 (0)1582 496 200, and Susan Okonjo-Reid's office will put a written proposal in the post within five working days of a site visit.

Page last updated 11 February 2003.