Worker Protection Act 2024: The Documents That Actually Prove You Took “Reasonable Steps”

The Worker Protection Act 2024 is in force, and the duty it places on employers is easy to misunderstand. It doesn’t ask you to promise you’ll deal with harassment if it happens. It asks you to show you took reasonable steps to prevent it before it happens. Those are two different tests, and only one of them can be evidenced with paperwork.

If a claim reaches an employment tribunal, the EHRC or the tribunal isn’t interested in whether your business feels like a safe place to work. They want to see what you actually did. In practice, that means specific documents, dated and on file, not a general sense that harassment “wouldn’t be tolerated here.”

Four things tend to come up in any serious assessment of compliance:

A written risk assessment. Not a policy statement, an actual assessment of where harassment risk sits in your specific business: client facing roles, late shifts, alcohol at work events, power imbalances between staff and managers.

A policy that covers third parties. EHRC guidance confirms the current duty covers sexual harassment of your staff by customers, clients and contractors, not just colleagues. From 30 October 2026, the Employment Rights Act 2025 turns this into a standalone duty covering all forms of harassment, not only sexual, so a policy that only addresses between staff conduct, or only sexual harassment, is worth widening now rather than later.

A reporting procedure people will actually use. If your only reporting route is “tell your line manager,” and the harassment involves that manager, you don’t have a workable procedure.

Training records. Not just that training happened, but who attended, when, and what it covered. Verbal assurances that “everyone knows the policy” don’t hold up if asked to evidence it.

Most UK employers already have some kind of anti-harassment policy sitting in a handbook somewhere. Very few have all four of the above, current, dated, and specific to their own business rather than copied from a generic template. That gap is exactly where exposure sits, both to enforcement and to an insurer or investor asking hard questions at renewal or due diligence.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 raises the standard from 'reasonable steps' to 'all reasonable steps' and adds a standalone duty not to permit third-party harassment of your staff, covering all forms of harassment rather than sexual harassment specifically. If you're building this documentation now, it's worth writing it to the higher standard from the start.

This is one of the areas Clausely was built to cover, not just the EU AI Act. Our Worker Protection Act Pack (£699) generates the Sexual Harassment Risk Assessment, Anti-Harassment Policy, Third-Party Harassment Policy, Reporting Procedure and Training Record templates as one set, tailored to your actual business rather than a generic template you’d need to rework. If you want to see the format before starting, there’s a downloadable brochure available on the pack page.

Clausely covers UK business compliance more broadly than any single piece of legislation, currently the EU AI Act, the Worker Protection Act 2024, and UK GDPR, with more compliance areas being added as we build them out.