8th June 2026 ❘ Legal News and Commentary

If You Acted on the 2024 Harassment Changes, There Is Still More to Do

In October 2024, the Worker Protection Act introduced a positive duty on employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment.

A lot of businesses acted on that. They updated their policies, ran training, reviewed their reporting procedures.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 has raised the bar again and this time, the change catches even the businesses that did everything right in 2024.

Two things have changed.

First: employer liability for third-party harassment has been reinstated. If your employees are harassed by customers, clients, contractors, or members of the public, your business can now be held liable, even though you didn’t employ the harasser. A policy written before this change almost certainly does not address it.

Second: there is now a potential compensation uplift of up to 25% where a tribunal finds the employer failed to take all reasonable preventative steps. On a harassment award of £40,000, that is an additional £10,000.

For any business with customer-facing or public-facing workers – a pub, a hospital ward, a call centre, a retail store – the combination of third-party liability and the compensation uplift requires a specific, documented response.

The most commercially sensible approach is an annual harassment prevention package: risk assessment, policy review, and training, delivered once a year, documented in a way that would satisfy a tribunal.

If you updated your harassment arrangements in 2024 and haven’t revisited them since, this is worth looking at before a claim arrives.

If you’d like further advice, please just get in touch and our Employment Law team will be happy to help. We offer an Employment Rights Act 2025 Legal Support Package which might be of interest to you too – find out more here.