Employment Rights Bill

The Employment Rights Bill provides for stronger laws against harassment – including from third parties.

The Worker Protection (Amendment to the Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 comes into force on 26 October 2024. As originally drafted, the Act obliged employers to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent sexual harassment of their employees, but this legal duty was watered down before the legislation was passed to provide that employers must take ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace.

The Employment Rights Bill will amend the Equality Act 2010 and ensure that the wider duty to take ‘all’ reasonable steps will apply.

The Bill will introduce a power to allow regulations to be made to specify steps that are to be regarded as ‘reasonable’ for the purpose of determining whether an employer has taken, or failed to take, all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of an employee. The Bill provides that such steps may include, specifically, the carrying out of risk assessments, publishing certain plans or policies, and taking steps relating to the reporting of sexual harassment and relating to the handling of complaints.

Separately, the Bill will make employers explicitly liable for permitting a third party to harass an employee, if harassment happens in the course of employment and the employer did not take all reasonably practicable steps to prevent this. The EHRC take the view that the sexual harassment preventative duty already covers third-party harassment, but this can only be enforced by the EHRC whereas the Bill will give workers the right to claim compensation for third-party harassment. The Bill also makes employers liable for harassment by third parties on any ground – not just sexual harassment.

The Bill also provides for disclosure of sexual harassment to be explicitly protected under existing whistleblowing legislation.