The government has confirmed that new rules aimed at reducing the occurrence of sexual harassment in the workplace will come into place towards the back end of 2024.

WHAT IS SEXUAL HARASSMENT?

Sex harassment occurs where:

• a person engages in unwanted conduct related to sex; and

• that conduct has the purpose or effect of either violating another person’s dignity, or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for that person.

WHAT’S CHANGING?

The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act (the "Act") places a new duty on employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. The Act also gives employment tribunals the power to increase an award of compensation by up to 25% in cases where an employer is unable to demonstrate that it took reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment from taking place.

WHAT NEXT?

The obligation from October 2024 for employers to be able to demonstrate that they’ve taken reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment from taking place is significant. It signifies that the government and tribunals will expect employers to take steps to prevent harassment from taking place as opposed to simply dealing with allegations of harassment effectively when they arrive. It’s also important for employers to understand that there is no upper cap on the level of compensation that can be awarded in successful sex harassment cases. This means that the tribunal’s ability to increase compensation by up to 25% is potentially a very significant development.

Employers have just under a year to review their anti-harassment systems and procedures. Our own view is that that work should start as possible. Having relevant policies and procedures in place will always be a good starting point but do your managers and team leaders know what’s in those policies and what they need to do to implement and maintain them? Are there steps that can be taken to modernise and update workplace attitudes and culture?

It’s also clear that equality, diversity & inclusion training is likely to be a key factor wherever an employer is attempting to defend an allegation of sexual harassment is trying to persuade a tribunal that it took reasonable steps to prevent that harassment from taking occurring in the first place.

It also seems likely that employers will be able to demonstrate that they have investigated harassment complaints in a timely and effective fashion and that they have adopted a proactive approach wherever a risk of harassment taking place is identified and/or actual allegations of harassment are being investigated and handled.

We work closely with numerous Yorkshire & UK businesses and organisations in order to help them create Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) policies and procedures that work. We’ve also developed an innovative & interactive range of EDI training materials and courses that we’re able to deliver either in person at your own workplace or virtually on-line. Please get in touch if you’d like to find out more or make an enquiry.