Most employers have read at least one article about October’s employment law changes by now. The legislation has been well covered; however, knowing what the law requires and having the systems, processes, and people in place to meet it are two very different things.
A business can know every detail of every change and still have gaps in its policies or blind spots in its management team.
So, we have four practical questions every employer should be able to answer before these changes take effect.
What Are the Employment Law Changes in October 2026?
Four significant changes will come into effect this October.
The sexual harassment duty rises from “reasonable steps” to “all reasonable steps”, and employer liability extends to third-party harassment, both on 30th October. The tribunal claim window doubles from three months to six months on 1st October, and trade union rights are set to expand, also on 30th October.
If you want the full details on the harassment changes specifically, we’ve covered them in depth in our two most recent blogs — Why Employees Don’t Report Sexual Harassment and Deciphering “All Reasonable Steps”. Acas also offers a clear summary of all the changes and their dates.
Question 1: Can You Demonstrate How You’re Preventing Sexual Harassment?
Most employers have policies surrounding sexual harassment. But if you were challenged today, could you demonstrate that you’ve taken all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in your workplace? What does your evidence actually look like?
From 30th October, the preventative duty rises from “reasonable steps” to “all reasonable steps”, a higher, more evidenced standard. Employment tribunals can increase compensation awarded to a successful claimant by up to 25% where the duty has been found to have been breached.
A policy on paper and an annual training session may not, on their own, demonstrate that an employer has taken all reasonable steps. The new duty puts greater emphasis on proactive prevention, including understanding the risks within your organisation and taking appropriate action to address them.
While the government hasn’t yet specified every step employers will need to take, the EHRC’s eight-step guide provides a useful framework for reviewing your current approach to preventing sexual harassment.
It covers:
- Risk assessment,
- Policies and procedures,
- Staff engagement,
- Reporting mechanisms,
- Training,
- Responding to complaints,
- Third-party harassment,
- Ongoing monitoring.
How many of those steps can you evidence right now?
Some useful questions to ask yourself may be:
- Has a risk assessment been carried out specifically for sexual harassment?
- When was training last delivered, and was it specific enough to be meaningful?
- Do employees know how to report concerns?
- Do employees trust that raising a concern will be taken seriously?
That last point matters more than many employers realise. As we explored in our earlier blog on reporting, 75% of those harassed at work did not report it. An absence of complaints is not a clean bill of health. It may simply mean that people don’t feel safe enough to come forward.
If the honest answer is “I’m not sure our evidence would hold up,” the time to address that is now. If you want an independent, structured picture of where your culture stands, the Petaurum Culture Scan is designed for that.
Question 2: Are You Prepared for Third-Party Harassment?
Think about your team’s working day. How much time do they spend with people outside your organisation: customers, clients, contractors, patients, members of the public? And what would happen if one of those people behaved inappropriately toward a member of your staff?
From 30th October, employers will be directly liable if they permit harassment of their employees by third parties, unless they can demonstrate they took all reasonable steps to prevent it.
Lone working with clients, business travel, client entertainment, and roles that involve regular public contact all create situations where a third party could behave inappropriately. Your organisation now has a legal obligation to have thought about that in advance.
Some practical questions to work through:
- Does your harassment policy specifically name third-party situations, or does it only address employee-to-employee conduct?
- Do employees know they can report a third party’s behaviour without worrying that it will affect a client relationship or reflect badly on them?
- Have you assessed which roles in your organisation carry the highest third-party risk?
And critically: if a member of staff told their manager that a customer had behaved inappropriately toward them, would that manager know what to do?
A poorly handled response can shut down a report before it’s properly addressed and leave both the employee and the organisation in a worse position than if nothing had been said at all.
Question 3: Would Your Managers Know What to Do if a Trade Union Approached Your Workplace?
A trade union representative contacts your organisation next month and says they’d like access to your workplace to meet with employees. Would your managers know how to respond?
The most likely problem employers will face won’t be a deliberate decision to obstruct a union. It will be a line manager who hasn’t been briefed, doesn’t know what the new rules are, panics slightly, and says or does something in the moment that they shouldn’t, exposing the business to legal trouble.
Is trade union access something your management team has been briefed on? Do your line managers and HR team know what a reasonable and legally sound response looks like? If the answer is no, a short, clear brief before the new changes arrive is worth far more than a difficult conversation afterwards.
Our People Management Training can help make sure your managers are confident and prepared, not just on this, but across the range of situations the Employment Rights Act changes are likely to bring.
The new duty to inform workers of their right to join a trade union, which was originally expected on 30th October 2026, will now come into force in January 2027, giving employers a little more time to prepare.
Under the new duty, employers will be required to notify employees of their right to join a trade union.
For new starters, this should be provided directly alongside their written statement of employment particulars. For existing workers, employers will be able to make the statement available somewhere accessible, with an annual reminder of where to find it by 5th April, or provide the statement directly and reissue it annually. Further guidance is awaited from the government.
Question 4: Are Your Records Ready for the New Six-Month Tribunal Time Limit?
From 1 October 2026, the time limit for most Employment Tribunal claims increases from three months to six months, applying where the relevant time limit starts on or after that date.
Are your records good enough to defend decisions you made four, five or six months ago? Documented decisions, written notes from disciplinary or performance conversations, and records of concerns raised and how they were responded to need to exist before the claim, not be reconstructed afterwards.
If your documentation isn’t where it needs to be, getting it in order before a claim lands is significantly better than trying to do so once one has. Our Interim HR Support is there for businesses that need practical, hands-on help working through exactly this kind of exercise.
Ready to Close the Gaps?
The goal of this blog isn’t to create anxiety. It’s to help you identify honestly where your gaps are while there’s still time to close them. If you’ve read through and found areas where you’re less certain than you’d like to be, that’s useful information you can act on.
October is close, but there is still time to make meaningful progress if you move now.
If the sexual harassment questions are where you have the most uncertainty, the Petaurum Culture Scan gives you an independent, structured diagnostic of your workplace culture benchmarked against the EHRC framework and built for organisations like yours.
For everything else, including manager training, documentation, policy reviews, or simply a conversation about where to start, get in touch, and we’ll help you figure out what needs to happen before the end of October.