Are You Ready for the New Sexual Harassment Prevention Duty?
We're six weeks away from a game-changing shift in employer responsibilities. The UK Workers Protection Act puts a positive requires employers to comply with a new duty to take 'reasonable steps' to prevent sexual harassment of employees: i.e. it’s become a positive obligation. Employers should ensure they are reviewing and refreshing their harassment policies and reporting procedures, conducting regular training sessions with employees and taking any harassment complaints seriously. Simply having policies and training in place will not be enough. Even if they're on your intranet and accessible to employees, you're still exposed to risk.
It's crucial to understand that policies alone, even if accessible on your intranet, will not suffice. To truly mitigate risk and foster a safe workplace, we must bring these policies to life through effective training.
However, be warned: a perfunctory training session that doesn't address known workplace issues won't meet the standard. At a minimum, your training should ensure employees:
Clearly understand what constitutes harassment
Know the expected workplace behaviour, including at work-related events and in online communications
Can navigate 'grey' areas such as banter
Understand the proper response if they experience or witness harassment
Know how to handle reported harassment
Are aware of the consequences of committing harassment
The key to effective training lies in customisation. The more you can align your training with your specific operational context, the better. For instance, tech companies like Google are utilising interactive e-learning tools to illustrate harassment in virtual spaces. Professional services firms are addressing power dynamics in their hierarchical structures.
Consider the Tesfagiorgis v Aspinalls Club case as a cautionary tale. Their 'all reasonable steps' defence failed because their training wasn't tailored to the business's specific harassment risk points.
If relevant, include guidance on third-party harassment. Provide clear, workplace-specific scenarios and advice on handling potential issues. For retail environments, this might include strategies for managing difficult customers and accessing support.
The impending change presents both a challenge and an opportunity to strengthen your organizational culture. By implementing comprehensive, tailored training, you're not just meeting a legal requirement – you're fostering a safer, more respectful workplace for all.
Are your current strategies sufficiently robust to meet this new standard? The time to act is now.
How Safe Workplace Can Support:
Free Sexual Harassment Training to remain compliant
Free Reporting Tool to support raising concerns when needed
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Related reading
What the duty actually requires
The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 came into force on 26 October 2024. It inserts a new section 40A into the Equality Act 2010, requiring employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their employees in the course of their employment.
Two things about that wording matter more than anything else in the Act.
First, it is anticipatory. Every other part of the Equality Act asks what you did after something happened. This asks what you did before. An employer with an exemplary investigation process and no preventative work is exposed in a way it was not before October 2024.
Second, it is a duty, not a defence. The pre-existing "all reasonable steps" defence at section 109(4) still exists and still works the same way. Section 40A sits alongside it and can be enforced even where no individual claim succeeds.
What happens when you get it wrong
There are two separate consequences, and they stack.
- An employment tribunal uplift. Where a sexual harassment claim succeeds and the tribunal finds the employer breached the preventative duty, it may increase the compensation by up to 25%. Because compensation for discrimination is uncapped, that uplift is applied to an uncapped figure.
- EHRC enforcement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission can act on the duty directly, without waiting for an individual to bring a claim. That includes investigations, unlawful act notices and binding agreements.
What "reasonable steps" looks like in practice
The Act does not define reasonable steps, and that is deliberate — what is reasonable for a 20-person practice differs from a 5,000-person trust. The EHRC's technical guidance sets the direction, and the pattern it describes should look familiar to anyone who has been through a CQC assessment: it is an evidence problem.
- A risk assessment specific to sexual harassment. Not a general workplace risk assessment with a line in it. The EHRC is explicit that an employer is unlikely to satisfy the duty without one, and it should consider third parties — customers, patients, contractors — not just colleagues.
- A policy people have actually read. Published, current, and with a record of who acknowledged it and when. A policy nobody can prove they saw is not a reasonable step.
- Training that is refreshed. One induction module three years ago will not do it. Records need to show who was trained, on what, and when it was renewed.
- Reporting routes people trust. Including at least one that does not run through the person's line manager, since the line manager is a common subject of the complaint.
- Evidence that you acted on what you found. Reports received, action taken, outcome, and any change to policy or training that followed.
- Review on a cycle. The duty is continuing. A single assessment in 2024 does not discharge it in 2026.
Third parties are the gap most employers still have
The duty covers harassment by third parties — patients, residents, customers, visiting contractors — where the employer has failed to take reasonable steps to prevent it. For health and social care in particular this is the most commonly missed part: providers frequently have solid internal policies and nothing at all covering the behaviour of the people they serve or their families.
If your incident reporting cannot distinguish a third-party harassment report from any other concern, you cannot evidence that you were monitoring it — and monitoring is a reasonable step.
Where this overlaps with CQC
For regulated providers, the preventative duty and the CQC's well-led key question ask for overlapping evidence: a live risk picture, policies people have acknowledged, training that is current, reporting routes staff trust, and proof that concerns led to action. Work done for one is not wasted on the other. The organisations that struggle with both are the ones whose evidence lives in separate systems.
Related: vulnerability in the workplace and what the CQC is and how it regulates.
Sources: Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 (c.51), s.1 (employer duty) and s.3 (compensation uplift); Equality Act 2010; EHRC technical guidance for employers on sexual harassment (see equalityhumanrights.com). Last reviewed: 30 July 2026. This is general information, not legal advice.