Two changes under the Employment Rights Act 2025 take effect on 30 October 2026. Together they are the biggest shift in harassment law since the preventative duty arrived in October 2024.
What changes on 30 October
- All reasonable steps. Since October 2024 you have had to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of your employees. From 30 October the standard becomes all reasonable steps. If a claimant can point to one reasonable step you did not take, the duty is likely to be breached.
- Harassment by third parties. You become liable when an employee is harassed in the course of their work by a customer, client, contractor, supplier or member of the public, unless you can show you took all reasonable steps to prevent it. This covers harassment related to any protected characteristic, not only sexual harassment, and it applies from the first incident.
Where a tribunal upholds a sexual harassment claim and finds you breached the preventative duty, it can increase compensation by up to 25%.
What counts as all reasonable steps
There is no checklist yet. The government can make regulations setting out specific steps, but they are not expected before 2027 at the earliest. Until then, the EHRC's guidance on the preventative duty is the minimum a tribunal will expect, and it will judge you on what you can show, not what you intended.
In practice that means a policy your staff have actually read, training, a written risk assessment, a reporting route people trust, and a record of what you did when concerns were raised.
Third parties need their own plan
If your staff deal with customers, clients or the public, the risk does not sit only inside your team. Think about late finishes, alcohol, lone visits, home visits and online contact. Then decide what you will do about it:
- Tell third parties that harassment of your staff will not be tolerated, through signage, terms of business or contracts.
- Give staff a clear way to report harassment by a third party.
- Make sure managers know they can refuse service, bar someone, or raise it with a client or supplier.
- Log every incident, including near misses.
One change that has moved
The duty to give workers a written statement of their right to join a trade union was also due on 30 October. The government has moved it to 1 January 2027, and the prescribed statement has not yet been published. Statutory trade union access rights still start on 30 October.
A reminder from 1 October: the time limit for most employment tribunal claims is now six months, not three, for acts on or after that date. Keep harassment complaint records for at least that long, plus any Acas early conciliation period.
What we have updated in Command
Your Anti-Harassment & Bullying, Equal Opportunities and Lone Working policies have been updated for these changes, and the Harassment Risk Assessment is now in the Health & Safety section of your template library. Where a policy is flagged in your Compliance module, replacing it and collecting staff acknowledgements gives you the evidence a tribunal will look for.