# What the 'All Reasonable Steps' Harassment Duty Means for Your Contracts Before 30 October 2026

> The 'all reasonable steps' harassment duty tightens around 2026. See how to fix employment contracts, policies and third-party terms before 30 October 2026.

**Author:** Imad Mohammed Nazar  
**Category:** Guides  
**Published:** 2026-10-05  
**Reading time:** 6 min

A sales manager makes repeated comments about a junior colleague at a client dinner. A contractor your agency placed on-site is accused of harassing someone on the client's team. In both cases, the first question an employment tribunal now asks is not just what happened, but what you did to stop it happening. That question is tightening, and your contracts are part of the answer.

**The short version.** Since 26 October 2024, employers in Great Britain have a legal duty to take _reasonable steps_ to prevent sexual harassment of their workers. The Government's Employment Rights Bill proposes to raise that to _all reasonable steps_, a higher bar expected to take effect around late 2026. Before that change lands, your employment contracts, handbooks and supplier agreements should actively evidence prevention, not just prohibit bad behaviour.

## What is the 'all reasonable steps' harassment duty?

The current duty sits in section 40A of the [Equality Act 2010](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/40A), inserted by the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023. It requires employers to take _reasonable steps_ to prevent sexual harassment of their workers in the course of employment. This is a positive, anticipatory duty. You have to act before an incident, not just respond after one.

The [Equality Act 2010](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents) applies to England, Wales and Scotland. The proposed upgrade to _all reasonable steps_ sits in the Employment Rights Bill currently before Parliament. The difference between the two wordings matters commercially. "Reasonable steps" lets you weigh cost and proportion. "All reasonable steps" expects you to show you considered every step that was reasonable and took the ones you could, which is far harder to satisfy with a single policy document gathering dust.

## How does this duty reach into my contracts?

Harassment prevention is usually treated as an HR problem. It is also a contract problem, because the documents that bind people to your rules are where "reasonable steps" become visible and enforceable. If a tribunal asks for evidence that you tried to prevent harassment, your paperwork is the first thing produced.

Three categories of document carry the weight:

- **Employment contracts.** The clauses that incorporate your anti-harassment policy, set conduct standards, and make breach a disciplinary (and potentially dismissible) matter.
- **Policies and handbooks.** Your anti-harassment and dignity-at-work policies, and whether they are properly incorporated into the contract or sit as non-binding guidance.
- **Third-party and supplier terms.** The duty covers harassment by third parties such as clients, customers and contractors. Your commercial contracts should set conduct expectations for people who come into contact with your workers.

## Where do most contracts fall short?

Plenty of businesses have an anti-harassment policy and assume they are covered. The gaps show up in how that policy connects, or fails to connect, to the contracts people actually sign.

| Common gap | Why it undermines the duty |
| --- | --- |
| Policy exists but isn't referenced in the employment contract | Harder to enforce as a contractual obligation; weaker evidence of a system rather than a leaflet |
| No conduct standards for third parties in client or contractor agreements | Third-party harassment is in scope, yet nothing in the commercial relationship addresses it |
| Reporting route named in the policy, missing from the contract or induction | Workers can't raise concerns through a route they were never contractually pointed to |
| Policy dated years ago, no record of review | "All reasonable steps" expects periodic review; a stale document reads as inaction |
| Managers have no defined obligation to act on complaints | Prevention fails at the first rung; the chain of accountability isn't written down anywhere |

## What steps actually count towards the duty?

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has published [technical guidance on sexual harassment at work](https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/guidance/sexual-harassment-and-harassment-work-technical-guidance) setting out the kind of action expected. From a contracting point of view, the steps that leave a durable record include:

1. **A current, specific anti-harassment policy** covering sexual harassment, third-party harassment and the reporting process, dated and version-controlled.
2. **Contractual incorporation.** Employment contracts that reference the policy and make compliance a condition of employment, so breach is a disciplinary matter rather than a vague expectation.
3. **A risk assessment.** A written assessment of where harassment is most likely (client events, lone working, customer-facing roles, site work) and what you've put in place to reduce it.
4. **Training records.** Evidence that staff and managers have been trained, with dates and attendance, refreshed periodically.
5. **Third-party conduct terms.** Clauses in client and supplier contracts requiring respectful treatment of your workers and giving you a route to escalate or terminate if someone harasses your people.
6. **A reporting and investigation route** that works, is signposted in the contract and induction, and produces a record when used.

None of these is a box to tick once. The test looks at whether prevention is a live, maintained system, which is why review dates and refreshed records matter as much as the documents themselves.

## How do I cover third-party harassment in commercial contracts?

This is the piece most businesses miss entirely. If your workers deal with clients, customers, contractors or visitors, those people can harass them, and the duty extends to preventing that. You can't discipline a client's employee, but you can build conduct expectations into the commercial relationship.

Practical additions to client and supplier terms include a short clause requiring both parties to ensure their personnel treat the other's workers with respect and not engage in harassment, a right to raise concerns through a named contact, and a right to remove an individual from a site or engagement where a credible complaint is made. For project-based work in sectors like construction, IT consultancy or energy, where your people sit on someone else's site for months, this is the difference between having a route to act and having none.

A worked example. An IT consultancy places three engineers on a client site. One reports persistent inappropriate comments from a member of the client's staff. If the master services agreement says nothing about conduct, the consultancy is negotiating from scratch under pressure. If it includes a mutual respect-at-work clause and a right to request reassignment, the consultancy has a contractual lever and, just as importantly, documented evidence it anticipated the risk.

## What should I do before 30 October 2026?

Treat the move to "all reasonable steps" as a deadline to get your documentation into a defensible state. A practical sequence:

- **Audit what you have.** Pull your anti-harassment policy, employment contract template and your top commercial contracts. Check the policy date, whether it's incorporated into the contract, and whether any third-party conduct terms exist.
- **Fix the incorporation.** Make sure the employment contract references the current policy and names the reporting route.
- **Add third-party clauses** to client and supplier agreements, especially for roles where workers are placed with or exposed to third parties.
- **Run and record a risk assessment** covering your actual working patterns.
- **Set a review cadence.** Diarise an annual review of the policy and contracts so you can show continuous, not one-off, effort.

Consistency across documents is where this gets hard. The policy, the employment contract, the handbook and the supplier terms all have to say compatible things, and they have to stay compatible as you update one of them. GenieAI reviews your contracts and policies against your own standards and flags inconsistencies on a red, amber and green basis, so a change to your harassment policy doesn't quietly leave your contract templates saying something different. You can see how that works across employment contracts and your wider contract templates.

The duty is already live, and the higher bar is coming. The businesses that handle it well won't be the ones with the longest policy. They'll be the ones whose contracts, policies and records line up and show, document by document, that prevention was taken seriously.

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