Sexual harassment in the workplace: What the UK law now requires

If a sexual harassment complaint surfaced tomorrow, could you prove what steps you took to prevent it? Could you demonstrate exactly when you knew there was a risk, and what you did next?

While most UK employers recognise the baseline changes introduced in October 2024, fewer are prepared for the escalating compliance bar set for 2026. The UK regulatory landscape is now shifting through three critical milestones, each one demanding greater transparency and more robust infrastructure, moving the standard from simple policy-writing to demonstrable, systemic prevention.

Three Critical Regulatory Milestones

• October 2024 (now enforceable): Under the Worker Protection Act 2023, employers must take “reasonable” steps to prevent sexual harassment. This fundamentally shifted the burden from responding after harm occurs to proactively demonstrating prevention before it does.
  
  
• April 2026: Sexual harassment disclosures gain full whistleblowing protections. Any attempt to silence, dismiss or penalise someone for reporting harassment becomes a separate legal breach and NDAs attempting to silence sexual harassment complaints become void.
  
  
• October 2026: The compliance threshold rises significantly with new enhanced proactive duty escalating from “reasonable steps” to “all reasonable steps”. Employers also become liable for third-party harassment (e.g. by a customer, client or contractor) if they fail to prevent it.

Defining “Reasonable Steps”: a Checklist for Employers

Regulators and tribunals are no longer interested in whether you have a document sitting on a server; they are looking for evidence of a living, breathing system and will ask: What did you know? When did you know it? What did you do next?

To meet the “reasonable steps” duty, the Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance outlines 8 critical areas where organisations must take proactive action:

1. Tailored Risk Assessments: Use anonymous staff surveys to identify what employees are experiencing and identify specific scenarios (social events, power imbalances, lone working) where harassment is likely.
   
   
2. Publishing Plans and Policies: Clearly communicate a zero-tolerance stance to all workers.
   
   
3. Senior Oversight: Appoint a designated lead with the authority to coordinate responses.
   
   
4. Practical Training: Provide mandatory, scenario-based training for all staff, including leadership.
   
   
5. Connected Infrastructure: Ensure screening data, speak-up reports, and exit interviews live in one system to reveal patterns before they escalate.
   
   
6. Steps Relating to Reporting: Provide secure, anonymous channels where employees feel safe to "speak up."
   
   
7. Boundaries with Third Parties: Share behavioural expectations for customers, contractors, and suppliers through displayed notices and clear contractual clauses.
   
   
8. Steps Relating to Handling Complaints: Ensure a structured, transparent, and timely investigation process, recording the rationale for every decision and preventative step taken.

The Cost of Failure

The financial stakes have risen alongside the legal ones. Employment tribunals can now increase compensation by up to 25% if an employer unreasonably failed to comply with the duty to prevent harassment. With tribunal awards for sexual harassment claims averaging £27,000 to £45,000, this 25% uplift - on top of legal fees and reputational damage - adds significant exposure.

Building Prevention Architecture

Updating your policies, running training sessions and reminding staff that harassment won't be tolerated are necessary steps, but they're not sufficient. Prevention as a culture requires infrastructure that makes early signals visible across the employee lifecycle. Without integration, assembling the full picture of an incident requires manual forensic work across disconnected siloes, often after it’s too late for early intervention.

The October 2026 escalation to “all reasonable steps” is approaching fast. Veremark's workplace trust platform integrates pre-hire screening with whistleblowing infrastructure, policy templates, training programs and audit trail management – giving employers the prevention architecture UK regulators now expect.

Talk to us about meeting the October 2026 standard.

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