A delivery driver says something to your apprentice at the gate. He works for the merchant, not for you. Or it’s the client’s site manager, on a job where you’re one of six firms and you don’t control the canteen, never mind the language in it.
Your supervisor hears about it. He has a word. It stops. Nobody writes anything down, because nothing like that has ever needed writing down.
From the end of October it is a legal event, and the only thing that will matter is what you can show.
What actually changes
Two things, both from the Employment Rights Act 2025 — the employment law overhaul that became law in December 2025 and is being switched on in stages. Most of it has nothing to do with you. These two do, and both land on 30 October.
The first is third-party harassment. “Harassment” has its Equality Act 2010 meaning: unwanted conduct connected to someone’s sex, race, disability, religion or age — among other protected characteristics — that degrades or humiliates them, or makes the place hostile to work in. A “third party” is anyone who is neither you nor one of your workers — a client, a delivery driver, another contractor’s operatives, a resident on an occupied refurb. From 30 October, if one of them harasses one of your people at work, you are liable unless you took all reasonable steps to prevent it.
This is returning law rather than new law. A version sat in the Equality Act until 2013, with a generous get-out: you were only on the hook if you already knew it had happened at least twice before. It was repealed. The version coming back has no threshold. Once is enough.
The second is a single word. Since October 2024 you have had a positive duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of your staff. Not to deal with it well when it happens. To stop it happening. On 30 October the word “all” goes in. All reasonable steps. That word has kept employment lawyers busy for a year. The question stops being “did you do something sensible?” and becomes “was there anything else you could reasonably have done?” You have to show your working.
Which makes it a records problem
Third-party harassment is a claim in its own right. The prevention duty isn’t: its bite is indirect. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the regulator here, can act against you without anyone having been harassed at all. And where someone wins a sexual harassment case at an employment tribunal, the tribunal can add up to a quarter to the award if you fell short on prevention.
One more date. From 1 October the window for bringing most tribunal claims doubles, from three months to six. So the thing your supervisor sorted out in March gets raised in September. By then the apprentice has left, the supervisor is on another site, and that week’s sign-in sheet is in a lever-arch file in a container.
Try it on your own firm. For one named person on one site, could you answer these inside the hour? Who has had your harassment briefing, when, and who is overdue. Who was inducted onto that site, including other firms’ operatives. Whether anything was reported, when and to whom. What was done about it, by whom, on what date. Whether you told the principal contractor — the firm legally in charge of that site.
In the firms I audit, the answer to the first is a folder of certificates with no expiry dates. The answer to the rest is one man’s memory.
What a fix looks like
Not an HR platform. You do not have a human resources problem on the scale those are built for, and buying one buys ninety features to service one obligation. Three small things instead.
A people record that carries training with an expiry date. Sat next to the card expiries you very likely track already. If you have a screen telling you whose CSCS card — the competence card most sites want at the gate — runs out next month, it should also tell you who hasn’t had the harassment briefing in a year. Same shape, one more column.
A reporting route that produces a record without anyone deciding to make one. A form on a phone, three taps from the home screen, open to anyone working on your sites. It stamps its own date, gives a reference number, and lands with a named individual, not a shared inbox four people assume someone else is reading. And it will not close until someone has typed what was done and when. That last part is the whole point. The action is what a tribunal asks about, and the action is the bit nobody writes down.
A site record you can search. Who was on which site, from which firm, on which days. Most of you half-have this in a signing-in book. It becomes worth something the moment you can search it by name and date instead of by thumb.
A fortnight of work, fitted to a business that already exists. Compliance is the least of it. A reporting route that gets used tells you which sites and which supervisors have a problem, twelve months before it becomes a claim or a resignation.
One thing software will not fix. Ask whoever handles your contracts what happens when one firm’s operative harasses another firm’s employee on a shared site — who tells whom, who investigates, who carries it. A conversation to have before October, not a database.
Where this doesn’t apply
If you are eight people out of one yard and you know every one of them by name, build nothing. Write a policy that people have actually read, do the briefing, keep the certificates somewhere findable, and write down anything that gets raised, on the day. What counts as reasonable is judged against the size and resources of the firm. A notebook is a reasonable step for a small outfit and an embarrassment for one with two hundred hands on site.
Same if you already run a proper HR system that logs incidents and chases actions. Check yours before you spend anything with me.
It matters if you run several sites at once, use agency or self-employed labour, work under principal contractors whose culture you don’t set, or take on apprentices — because the person least likely to report anything is nearly always the youngest one on site, who has no idea it is even reportable.
If you want to know how your own records would look in front of a tribunal, get in touch.