The preventative duty on sexual harassment covers trans-related harassment only partly, and the gap is worth stating plainly rather than blurring. Since 26 October 2024, employers have been under a legal duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their staff — not merely to deal with it once it has happened. It is a real duty, the regulator can enforce it, and it has money attached.
But it reaches sexual harassment only. It does not create an equivalent duty to prevent harassment of someone for being trans, or because of their sex, race or religion, and it should never be described as though it does. The duty comes from the Equality Act 2010, as amended by the Worker Protection Act 2023.
Where does the line actually sit?
The Equality Act treats harassment as unwanted conduct that violates someone’s dignity or makes their environment hostile, degrading or offensive. It then splits that into two kinds. One is conduct aimed at a characteristic a person has — being trans, for instance, which the Act protects in its own right. The other is conduct of a sexual nature: sexual harassment. The preventative duty attaches to the second kind only. There is, at present, no equivalent duty to prevent harassment of someone because they are trans.
Why most trans-staff complaints carry both dimensions at once
Harassment experienced by a trans employee is rarely one clean thing. Comments about someone’s body, intrusive questions about surgery or anatomy, conduct framed around what someone is presumed to be underneath — these are, at the same moment, harassment because a person is trans and harassment of a sexual nature. Where that second element is present, and it very often is, the preventative duty applies in full.
That is why this duty belongs on a trans-inclusion page. Not because it protects trans staff directly — it does not, and that gap is real — but because it changes what is at stake on exactly the complaints trans staff most often bring. The complaints playbook sets out how to read an incoming complaint for what it actually contains.
Is the policy in the handbook enough?
No — and the Court of Appeal has said so directly. In Unite the Union v Nailard, an employer argued it had taken all reasonable steps because it had a policy. The court disagreed: a policy’s existence does not, by itself, make out that defence. What counts is evidence of training actually delivered, monitoring actually carried out, and enforcement actually applied.
That case was about a slightly different defence, so it is not a direct ruling on this duty. But the standard it sets is the same one, and the lesson transfers cleanly: reasonable steps is something you do and can show, not something you write down once. What defensible decision-making requires here is that same evidence, recorded as you go — not reconstructed after a complaint lands.
What changed on 6 April 2026?
Since April 2026, someone who reports sexual harassment is formally a whistleblower. The Employment Rights Act 2025 settled that question, which used to be genuinely murky.
The practical consequence is worth understanding. It means treating a person badly for having raised a complaint is now clearly a second, separate claim — one about how you responded, sitting alongside the original one about what happened. Handle the first report poorly and you have not contained the problem, you have doubled it. Where that starts to escalate, escalating legal and reputational risk is the next thing to read.
What does this add up to financially?
Where a tribunal finds sexual harassment happened and the employer had not taken reasonable steps to prevent it, it can add up to 25% to the compensation — on top of the award for injury to feelings, which follows the three Vento bands and is uprated each year. Separately, the EHRC can look at whether you are meeting the duty without waiting for anyone to complain.
Neither point is a reason to catastrophise a single complaint. Both are reasons to have the evidence built before one arrives, because it is the one thing you cannot create retrospectively.
In a nutshell
If you take five things from this page, take these:
- You have a legal duty to stop sexual harassment before it happens — not just to deal with it afterwards. That has been true since October 2024.
- The duty does not cover harassment of someone for being trans. That is a real gap in the law, and anyone telling you otherwise is wrong.
- But it usually still applies anyway. Harassment of a trans colleague tends to come wrapped up with comments and conduct of a sexual kind — and the moment it does, the duty is engaged.
- Having a policy is not the same as having done something. If you cannot show the training people actually had, the checks someone actually ran, and what actually happened to someone who broke the rules, you have a document, not a defence.
- It costs more to have done nothing. A tribunal can add up to a quarter to the compensation where you had not taken reasonable steps, and the regulator can ask you about it without anyone having complained at all.
The practical task is simply to be able to answer the question “what have you done to prevent this?” with evidence rather than intention — and to be able to answer it on the day someone asks, not three months later.
What this page cannot give you is that evidence. The file that would stand up is specific to your workplace, your risks and what you have actually done about them, and it has to exist before a complaint arrives. That is the work the tools below do.