From 31 October 2026, Section 21 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 inserts new subsections into Section 40 of the Equality Act 2010 which makes employers liable for third-party harassment.
The new test tribunals are likely to apply is to identify what steps an employer took, then consider whether there were any further steps they could reasonably have taken. If there is one further reasonable step available that the employer did not take, then they will fail. And it does not matter that the step would not actually have prevented anything. Reasonableness is going to be the test, not effectiveness.
Then there is the fact that tribunals already know that training wears off like a vaccine, and that harassment happening despite an employer’s training is itself evidence the training was not good enough. Which you might think is harsh, but tells you exactly what standard tribunals will likely apply.
Plus, to really ram home the point, the EHRC’s technical guidance also says that an employer is unlikely to be able to comply with the preventative duty unless it carries out a risk assessment. That is as close as a regulator gets to saying: no risk assessment, no defence.
You have been warned in good time!