Worker Protection: What Changes on 30 October 2026?

The current preventative duty has required employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment since 26 October 2024. From 30 October 2026, the Employment Rights Act 2025 strengthens that wording to 'all reasonable steps'.

The same date also brings in a duty not to permit harassment of employees by third parties. The legislation treats an employer as permitting that harassment where a third party harasses an employee in the course of employment and the employer failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent it.

Depending on the workplace, third parties can include customers, clients, service users, patients, suppliers, contractors, visitors and other people who are neither the employer nor a fellow employee. The new third-party provision covers harassment under the Equality Act definition, including sexual harassment and harassment related to protected characteristics covered by that provision.

That makes client-facing and public-facing risk particularly important. A policy focused only on colleague-to-colleague conduct can miss a significant part of the exposure.

• Your risk assessment: identify where sexual harassment and third-party harassment could occur in your actual working environment.
• Your policy: make sure responsibilities, prohibited conduct, third-party scenarios and consequences are clear.
• Reporting routes: give employees a workable alternative when their manager is involved or unavailable.
• Training: make it relevant to roles and risks rather than relying on a one-off generic slide deck.
• Third-party controls: consider contracts, customer conduct rules, signage, escalation routes, event arrangements and how staff can withdraw from unsafe interactions.
• Evidence: retain proportionate records of the preventative steps taken and when they were reviewed.

The legal test is about the reasonable preventative steps an employer takes in its circumstances. Documents matter because they can turn decisions into repeatable processes and evidence, but a policy sitting unread in a folder is not the same thing as an effective prevention system.

The Employment Rights Act also gives ministers power to specify evidence-based reasonable steps by regulations in future. Government guidance says that power complements rather than replaces the broader duty, so employers should keep their controls under review.

If you are updating your documents now, there is little commercial sense in building only for the pre-30 October wording and doing the work again weeks later. Clausely's Worker Protection Pack is positioned around the stronger 2026 standard and your organisation's actual risk profile.

For a deeper look at the evidence set, read the documents that help evidence reasonable steps.