Your employer’s duty to prevent harassment is getting stronger, and now covers harassment by customers and clients too

From October 2026, your employer’s legal duty to prevent 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... at work gets significantly stronger, and it stops being limited to sexual harassment. Employers also become liable if a customer, client, or other third party harasses you, not just if a colleague does.

What’s changing

A stronger prevention duty. Since October 2024, employers have had a duty to take “reasonable steps” to prevent sexual harassment of their staff. From October 2026, that duty is upgraded to “all reasonable steps”, a noticeably higher bar, and it’s extended to cover harassment related to any protected characteristicOne of the nine characteristics listed in the Equality Act 2010 against which it is unlawful to discriminate. They include age, disability, race, sex, religion or belief, and sexual orientation. If yo..., not just sex. That means race, disability, religion, sexual orientation, age, and the other protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010The main piece of legislation protecting employees from discrimination at work. It covers nine protected characteristics including age, disability, sex, race, and religion, and makes it unlawful for a... are all now within scope of the prevention duty, not just harassment of a sexual nature.

Third-party harassmentHarassment of an employee by someone who is not their employer's own staff, a customer, client, contractor, or member of the public. From October 2026, an employer can be held liable for this if it fa... liability returns. Harassment from outside the organisation, a customer, a client, a contractor, a member of the public, becomes something your employer can be held liable for from October 2026, if they didn’t take all reasonable stepsThe legal standard your employer must meet under the duty to prevent harassment, in force from October 2026. It is a higher bar than the earlier "reasonable steps" standard, and generally means proact... to prevent it. This closes a gap that’s existed since 2013, when the previous third-party harassment provisions were repealed.

What “all reasonable steps” is likely to mean

The detailed statutory guidance on exactly what “all reasonable steps” requires in practice is not expected until 2027, after the duty itself commences. That’s an unusual sequencing and worth being aware of: employers will be operating under the stronger duty before the full official guidance exists to tell them precisely how to meet it.

Existing Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance and the 2024 version of the duty give some clues about what’s coming. A written policy alone won’t cut it. Expect the bar to include training that actually gets delivered, a reporting process people can genuinely use, and evidence that complaints get acted on, not just filed away.

What it means for you

If you work in a role with public contact, retail, hospitality, healthcare, transport, this change matters directly. Harassment from a customer or member of the public that your employer previously had limited responsibility for becomes something they can be held accountable for not preventing, from October 2026 onward.

If you’ve raised concerns about harassment, from a colleague or from someone outside the organisation, and felt like nothing structurally changed afterward, this raises the stakes for your employer to show they took real, not token, steps. A policy that exists on paper but isn’t backed by training or a working reporting process is unlikely to meet the new bar.

Two real tribunal decisions show how this plays out in practice. In NSL Ltd v Zaluski, a manager’s conduct was found to amount to race-related harassment even without proof of discriminatory intent. In Gibbins v Cardiff and Vale University Local Health Board, a broken promise made during a grievanceA formal complaint raised by an employee against their employer, triggering a legal obligation to investigate and respond. outcome was itself found to be harassment. If you want to understand the legal test tribunals actually use, read what counts as harassment at work.

What to do if this affects you

It helps to keep a record: what happened, how your employer responded, whether you were told about a policy, offered training, or given a clear way to report a problem. If your employer’s response looks thin against the “all reasonable steps” standard once this is in force, that’s relevant to any claim you bring.