Harassment: two significant changes from 30 October 2026

Adrian Fryer

The Employment Rights Act 2025 makes two significant amendments to the harassment provisions of the Equality Act 2010 from 30 October 2026.

The preventative duty: ‘all reasonable steps’

Section 40A Equality Act 2010 currently requires employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their employees.

The 2025 Act strengthens that duty by inserting the word “all”. Employers will therefore be required to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment.

What is reasonable will remain fact-sensitive, but the statutory test requires consideration of whether there are additional preventative steps the employer could reasonably have taken.

The Act also creates a power for regulations to specify particular preventative steps, potentially including risk assessments, policies, reporting arrangements and procedures for handling complaints. Those regulations will complement, rather than replace, the wider all reasonable steps test.

Third-party harassment returns

The Act also introduces a new section 40(1A) Equality Act 2010, providing that an employer must not “permit” a third party to harass an employee.

For these purposes, an employer permits harassment where the third party harasses the employee in the course of their employment and the employer failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent it.

Importantly, this provision is wider than the section 40A preventative duty. It is not restricted to sexual harassment. It encompasses the forms of harassment covered by section 26 Equality Act 2010, including harassment related to protected characteristics such as race, disability, age, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.

Nor is liability dependent upon a previous incident. The statutory test focuses on the preventative steps taken by the employer.

The two reforms therefore share a common theme: prevention. From 30 October, the question of what risks an employer could reasonably have anticipated, and what it could reasonably have done about them, becomes even more important.

Contact Adrian Fryer, Senior Partner and Head of Employment.