Duty to prevent sexual harassment | EHRC Guidance
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Duty to prevent sexual harassment | EHRC Guidance


On 12 November 2024, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published new guidance on the positive duty to prevent sexual harassment. Their guidance includes reference to a checklist, action plan and monitoring log to assist employers with this duty.

What is the new positive duty?

As you may (and should!) already be aware the law changed on 26 October 2024, introducing a new preventative duty which requires all employers to proactively prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. This goes above and beyond the previous duty to defend claims for sexual harassment in the workplace and also goes beyond the ‘reasonable steps defence’.

For further information on the changes you might like to read our related blog on the Steps to Prevent Harassment in the Workplace.

Brief overview of the Guidance

The guidance refers to a checklist, action plan and monitoring log which should be formulated and used alongside your existing policies and procedures to help you comply with the preventative duty. Unfortunately, the EHRC have not provided ‘template’ documents, but the guidance does address the contents of each.

Checklist

A checklist is designed to support an employer in complying with their duty during the day-to-day running of their business. It should cover 3 main areas:

  1. Communication with staff (how to promote a culture of zero tolerance);
  2. Changing the work environment to make it as safe as possible (controlling the physical and social environment that employees are working in to make it as safe as possible); and
  3. Working practices (putting policies/procedures in place to make sure the employer knows when sexual harassment happens and how it is dealt with).

The checklist should become part of your organisation’s working practice and the action plan (see below) should aid with this process.

Although the EHRC’s checklist was originally designed for use in the hospitality sector, they have confirmed that it can be adapted for use in other sectors. It will be interesting to see how the guidance on this develops as the current format refers to a ‘start’ and ‘end’ of shift checklist which may be difficult to transpose into, for example, an office scenario. We will continue to provide you with updates on this as the guidance develops.

Action plan

The action plan should outline the action the organisation needs to take to be able to use the checklist as part of its working practices.

It may be useful to address the following things in your action plan:

  • Sexual harassment policies – updating and making staff aware of them
  • Training – making sure employees are fully trained and know what to do if sexual harassment occurs
  • Recording – who you need to speak to so that the checklist is used across your organisation effectively and not just in one area of the business, additional actions to add to the checklist and any changes to the checklist where relevant
  • Supporting – making sure employees are supported so that they can use the checklist correctly

Monitoring log

Lastly, the monitoring log will be used to help your organisation monitor how the checklist and action plan are being used. The guidance suggests that an in-depth log should be taken every quarter to help record the effectiveness of the checklist and action plan in place. Following which, any additions and/or changes to the checklist should be noted in your action plan.

If you have any questions about this or would like to discuss the legal implications of the preventative duty in more detail, please get in touch with a member of the Employment team.

 

We publish blogs and social media posts to give a general overview of legal and commercial issues, relevant at the time of publication, which we hope you will find interesting. Please note that legal rules often change depending on the specific facts of a situation. The law also changes over time following changes in legislation or new court cases. We do not actively update our blogs or posts once they are published to reflect changes in the law.

As such, our blogs and posts are not intended to advise you on the law and must not be relied upon as legal advice. If you require advice on a particular issue then please contact us and we will be pleased to help.



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