Worker Protection Bill Update – Third Party Harassment Scrapped?

Amendments agreed by the House of Lords to the Worker Protection Bill look likely to be accepted by the government. It seems that employer liability for harassment by third parties will no longer be introduced, and the new duty to prevent sexual harassment has also been watered down.

As we explored in our previous article on the Worker Protection Bill, this legislation proposed new obligations on employers to prevent harassment and involved some of the most significant changes to workplace discrimination law in Great Britain since the 2010 Equality Act.

The Bill ran into problems during its passage through Parliament. The government introduced an amendment that was designed to tackle concerns around the potential impact of the new anti-harassment protections on free speech. This would have had some (seemingly) unintended consequences, by changing the well-established existing test for harassment by colleagues as well as by third parties. The Bill attracted more