Harassment law says prevent. Mental health gets a return plan

From 30 October employers must take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment. The national plan for health at work is about keeping people in work and getting them back.

On 30 October 2026 the law on sexual harassment at work gets stronger. Employers already have to take reasonable steps to prevent it. From that date it becomes all reasonable steps. They must not let third parties harass their staff either. And a minister gets the power to set out, in regulations, steps employers must take.

Those are the words: prevent, and must.

Now look at what’s being built for health at work, mental health included, in the same year. The government’s Keep Britain Working programme is putting together a new employer standard with the British Standards Institution. It’s voluntary: the plan says its success will be “measured by adoption”. It’s meant to avoid being “overly prescriptive”. And nearly everything being tested with employers is about keeping people in work, or getting them back, once they’ve already become unwell.

Same employer. Same building. One harm gets a duty to prevent it. The other gets a return-to-work plan.

What the harassment duty says

Since 26 October 2024, section 40A of the Equality Act has said an employer “must take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment” of its employees. The government’s timeline for the Employment Rights Act sets out what changes on 30 October:

employers must take “all reasonable steps” to prevent sexual harassment of their employees
employers must not permit harassment of their employees by third parties
a minister can make regulations “specifying evidence-based steps which employers must take to prevent sexual harassment”

I’m not an employment lawyer. But you don’t need to be one to see what it’s doing. The law names the harm, puts the duty on the employer, says prevent, and leaves room to spell out what prevention has to include. That’s what it looks like when government decides a harm at work matters.

What the work and health plan says

The September Keep Britain Working update is over 10,000 words, and the word prevent is in it. “The greatest opportunity is not to recover people after they have become detached from work; it is to prevent avoidable work loss in the first place.”

What’s being prevented there is work loss. Not ill health.

Then look at the commitments it’s testing with employers. A conversation within five working days of an issue being raised. A stay-in-work plan. Contact on day one of absence, and no later than day three. A return-to-work plan for any absence, particularly longer ones. Sustained return measured at six months. Under the heading “act early to prevent issues” there is one commitment: a work and health conversation offered within eight weeks of someone joining.

To be fair, the principles above those commitments talk about treating health as a work-design issue. None of the commitments ask anyone to change how the work is designed. The plan also says they’re early examples “as opposed to firm proposals”, and that the programme’s role is “to stimulate system change, not to prescribe it”.

I’ve no argument with keeping in touch with someone who’s off, or getting adjustments in quickly. Those matter. But nearly every one of them starts after someone is already struggling.

There’s already a duty. Nobody enforces it

There is a legal duty on employers to manage the risk of work-related stress, and there has been for decades. I wrote about it when the Health and Safety Executive found the University of Birmingham in material breach of it, one of the first high-profile cases of its kind. Meanwhile HSE’s own figures for 2024/25 show 964,000 workers with work-related stress, depression or anxiety and 22.1 million working days lost to it.

So the law isn’t silent. The general duty sits there, barely enforced, and the new national plan does nothing to strengthen it. Harassment got a named duty, and then a stronger one. Mental health got a voluntary standard.

What happens when nothing is written down

In August Disability News Service asked the HSE why it had never investigated the deaths of benefit claimants linked to the Department for Work and Pensions. The department’s own figures showed 110 internal reviews following a claimant’s death in 2025-26.

The HSE said it was “not aware of any recognised health and safety standards, established through health and safety legislation or related guidance, that govern the matters raised”. And that “establishing causation in cases involving suicide is particularly challenging given the range of factors that may contribute to an individual’s death.”

Those are claimants, not employees, and it’s a different part of the law. But look at how the reasoning goes. No written standard, so nothing to measure against. Nothing to measure against, so nothing to investigate. And because suicide has many causes, nobody is held to account for any of them.

And a voluntary standard isn’t law, so it gives the regulator nothing to enforce either.

A duty won’t fix it on its own

A duty to prevent harassment won’t end harassment either. What changes a workplace is who runs it and whose interests it’s run for, and that’s as true of stress as of anything else. But a duty does one thing a voluntary standard can’t. It puts prevention on the employer and says it isn’t optional.

I train mental health first aiders. They’re good at noticing when a colleague is struggling, and they matter. But we keep counting work-related stress and not asking why, and first aiders can’t change the workload that caused it. They shouldn’t be the whole plan, and neither should a return-to-work form.

The law already asks employers to protect people’s health at work. What harassment is getting, and mental health isn’t, is a duty that names the harm, says prevent, and can spell out the steps.

We know how to write that. It’s sitting in the Equality Act.

If you'd like to support this blog, you can buy me a coffee.

Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi

Comments

Loading comments…

Comments appear once I've read them. I'll put up the ones that are about the post and are useful, interesting, supportive or constructive. Anything else won't go up. Your email is never shown or shared.