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 may 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 – 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 to discuss what the current standard of prevention actually requires please contact us.