Women’s Night Safety Accreditation

Project overview

We commissioned Six Till Six to develop a self-assessment accreditation for businesses in the borough, focused on increasing safety for women in the night time economy. This is part of our wider  Night Safety campaign which supports businesses operating in Westminster to be equipped with the right tools to increase women’s safety at night.  

Six Till Six have brought extensive experience to the project, having developed and managed accreditation schemes such as the national Best Bar None scheme for licensed premises. They have also designed and delivered numerous projects that support women’s safety and address vulnerability.

In order to pass the Women’s Night Safety Accreditation, all Managers of front of house and public facing work, must have completed the following mandatory training:

• Safeguarding and vulnerability training, 50 minutes
• Anti-sexual harassment training, 50 minutes

Complete the mandatory training

Piano Works were one of the first businesses to be accredited  and Tristan Moffat, Operations Director of Piano Work has said:

We are always pleased to be involved in any initiative that helps our guests to feel safe and welcome.

Our musicians and entire teams are trained to spot unwelcome behaviour and we are delighted that our West End venue have been recognised and accredited by this excellent scheme.

We will certainly encourage our friends in other venues in Soho to join.

How to become accredited

The Night Safety Accreditation has been developed on a self-assessment basis with council staff undertaking spot checks on a number of businesses, both virtually and on site, to ensure integrity of the accreditation. 

You will need to fill out an online questionnaire that takes around ten minutes to complete, covering several themed questions including: 

• the types of safety and vulnerability training the business provides to their staff 
• how the business ensures that their communications don’t use victim blaming language 
• processes and procedures in place to deal with reporting any incidents of sexual harassment, for both staff and customers.

Once the online self-assessment has been completed, your business will receive a report detailing their score, and whether or not you have met the essential criteria to gain accreditation. The report will contain resources to support businesses with ongoing improvements in their processes, procedures and training.

If you don't quite meet the standard just yet, the report will let you know what to do to become accredited. This helps to raise industry standards and improve women’s safety throughout Westminster.

When a business becomes accredited it will be able to use the Westminster Night Safety Accreditation logo in their communications. This will show that they have committed to meet the high standards required to help keep women safe in their premises at night.

The accreditation will last for 12 months before businesses will be required to complete the assessment again to ensure they are still upholding the necessary standards.

Take the self-assessment accreditation

Project pilot

In order to test the accreditation and shake out any potential issues that need to be addressed, a pilot with around 25 venues was carried out, encompassing both licensed and unlicensed premises to ensure a broad representation from different types of business. 

Based on the positive response from stakeholders, we expect the accreditation to gain traction with businesses throughout Westminster. The project meets our ambition to improve safety for women by: 

• raising operator standards 
• promoting best practice 
• reassuring women who use our night time economy that their safety is our top priority 

Contact us

If you would like to know more about the Night Safety accreditation scheme, please email us at [email protected]