ERA 2025: The Duty to Prevent Third-Party Harassment

The Employment Rights Act 2025 reinstates and strengthens the duty on employers to take reasonable steps to prevent third-party harassment of their workers. If a customer, client, or contractor sexually harasses one of your employees, you can be held liable if you did not take preventive steps.

The previous version of this duty — repealed in 2013 — required harassment to occur on three separate occasions before liability attached. The new duty has no such threshold. A single incident can be enough to trigger liability if it can be shown the employer had not taken reasonable preventive action.

Reasonable steps typically include a clear anti-harassment policy, training for staff who interact with the public, a safe reporting route, and a track record of acting on complaints. Mellow's policy hub holds your harassment policy and tracks when each employee has acknowledged it. If an incident does occur, you want to demonstrate that prevention was taken seriously, not adopted after the fact.