Who can be held responsible for harassment at work

Your complaint doesn’t have to stop at your employer’s name. The law gives you more than one route to hold people accountable.

Your employer, even if they didn’t know

It doesn’t matter whether your employer knew or approved. They’re usually vicariously liable for harassmentUnwanted behaviour related to a protected characteristic, such as your sex, race, disability, age or religion, that violates your dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile or humiliating environment... by anyone acting on their behalf, staff, agents, or contractors alike. Training, clear policies, and actually enforcing them give an employer a genuine defence here. Without that, the liability sticks.

The person who harassed you, named directly

The person who harassed you can be personally named as a respondent too, standing alongside your employer, not instead of them. Being an individual gives them no shield.

Anyone who pushed them into it, or helped them get away with it

Someone who told, pressured, or encouraged another person to harass you can be liable for that, even without laying a finger on the situation themselves. The same goes for anyone who knowingly helped the harassment along, covering it up, smoothing it over, or making it easier to continue.

In practice, this means a specific manager or colleague can be named directly in a claim, not folded anonymously into “the company.” Anyone who pushed them into it, or helped them get away with it, can be named too.

Our guide on what counts as harassment at work covers the test tribunals actually use for whether conduct counts as harassment in the first place.