This article expands on Rebecca Evans’ piece published in The Negotiator in August 2025. Read the original article in The Negotiator →
Between October 2025 and April 2026, four major updates to UK employment law permanently changed the obligations on every employer in the country. For estate and letting agents — whose staff spend much of their working day alone with members of the public in unfamiliar properties — the implications are acute and the compliance window is closing.
This is a comprehensive breakdown of each change, what it requires in practice, and the specific steps your agency should take before the October 2026 deadline.
The four changes in full
1. The ‘all reasonable steps’ duty
The Worker Protection Act 2023 placed a proactive duty on employers to take ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent sexual harassment. The Employment Rights Act 2025 escalates that standard to ‘all reasonable steps’ — a materially higher bar that courts and tribunals will assess strictly.
The difference is not semantic. ‘Reasonable steps’ allowed employers to point to a policy document and basic training as evidence of compliance. ‘All reasonable steps’ requires employers to demonstrate:
- A documented risk assessment specifically addressing harassment scenarios in their working environment
- Active preventative technology — not a phone number to call in a situation where calling a phone number is not practical
- A confidential, encrypted, and independently accessible reporting channel
- Regular review cycles with evidence of ongoing compliance effort
The October 2026 implementation date is five months away. The compliance programme required to meet this standard takes longer than five months to properly embed. The time to act is now.
2. Third-party harassment liability
This is the change that most directly affects the property sector.
From October 2026, employers become liable for harassment carried out by clients, customers, contractors, or members of the public — and not only sexual harassment. Any harassment linked to a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 (race, religion, disability, age, sex, and others) can result in employer liability if adequate prevention steps cannot be evidenced.
For estate and letting agents, this liability is substantial. Consider the routine working day of a lettings negotiator:
- Morning: accompanied viewing with a prospective tenant who has not been vetted
- Afternoon: unaccompanied inspection at a property where the existing tenant is present
- Evening: open day where multiple unknown members of the public attend simultaneously
In each of these scenarios, the employer has a legal duty to assess the nature and frequency of third-party contact, implement preventative safety systems, and be able to evidence that assessment to a tribunal if challenged.
A harassment tribunal claim resulting from a client interaction during a property viewing carries unlimited compensation potential, plus a 25% uplift under WPA 2023 if the employer cannot demonstrate compliance. For the average estate agency, a single successful claim represents an existential financial event.
3. Protected whistleblowing for harassment disclosures
From April 2026 — a date that is already live — sexual harassment disclosures made by employees are explicitly classified as protected whistleblowing disclosures under ERA 2025.
This means:
- Day-one protection applies. An employee does not need to have completed a qualifying period to be protected from retaliation. From their first day, if they report sexual harassment, they are protected.
- Retaliation is automatically unlawful. A dismissal, demotion, exclusion from opportunities, or any other detrimental treatment following a harassment disclosure is grounds for an immediate and uncapped retaliation claim.
- The reporting channel must be structurally private. A suggestion box, a line manager conversation, a general HR email, or any reporting mechanism that makes the reporter visible to management — especially when the report concerns a manager — does not satisfy the duty.
The critical requirement is that employees can report confidentially, from anywhere, at any time, on their own device, without the report being routed through anyone they are reporting.
4. NDAs can no longer silence victims
Any confidentiality clause — in a contract of employment, settlement agreement, or non-disclosure agreement — that prevents a worker from speaking out about harassment or discrimination is void. This applies to both employees and witnesses.
Agencies should review existing contracts and settlement agreements now. Any clause that could be interpreted as preventing a staff member from disclosing harassment is legally unenforceable, and attempting to enforce it creates further liability.
Why property viewings are specifically high-risk
The property sector sits in an unusual position within UK employment law because it combines three risk factors that rarely coexist in other industries:
Physical isolation. A negotiator conducting a viewing is alone — often in a property with no other occupants, no colleagues, and no reliable communication infrastructure. Every unaccompanied viewing meets the HSE INDG73 definition of lone working.
Unvetted third-party contact. Unlike, for example, a retail environment where customers are broadly anonymous members of the public in a supervised space, property viewings involve extended one-to-one contact with individuals who have been given a specific address and a specific time. The power dynamic is asymmetric and the environment is private.
Emotional pressure. Property transactions frequently involve financial stress, relationship breakdown, and high-stakes decision-making. These are conditions that escalate the potential for confrontational or harassing behaviour.
The EHRC Guidance on the WPA 2023 proactive duty specifically identifies environments with these three characteristics as requiring heightened assessment and more rigorous preventative measures.
What a compliant programme looks like
The EHRC and ERA 2025 regulations do not specify a single compliant technology solution. What they require is a programme that, taken together, satisfies the ‘all reasonable steps’ test. Based on current regulatory guidance, that programme should include:
| Compliance component | What it requires | What does not qualify |
|---|---|---|
| Risk assessment | Documented, sector-specific, reviewed annually | Generic HR policy template |
| Emergency alerting | Dedicated safety technology with monitored alarm | Mobile phone call or WhatsApp |
| Incident reporting | Encrypted, confidential, accessible outside the workplace | HR email or suggestion box |
| Policy documentation | EHRC-aligned, current, distributed | Filed handbook policy |
| Staff training | Structured, evidenced, tool-specific | One-off induction mention |
| Audit trail | Logged, tamper-proof, employer-accessible | Manual register or spreadsheet |
Satisfying all six components is what ‘all reasonable steps’ means in practice. Satisfying three or four is not compliance — it is a partial defence at best.
The financial exposure in full
The financial risk of non-compliance is not theoretical. The following figures reflect current tribunal data and ERA 2025 uplift provisions:
| Risk | Financial impact |
|---|---|
| Average harassment tribunal award | £53,403 (uncapped) |
| WPA 2023 uplift for non-compliance | +25% bringing the total to ~£66,753 |
| ERA 2025 whistleblowing retaliation claim | Separate, additional uncapped award |
| HSE Fee for Intervention | £188/hour during investigation |
| Legal defence costs | Typically £15,000–£50,000 |
For a 10-person agency, The Sentry costs £395 per year. The maths does not require a risk management specialist to interpret.
The compliance timeline for October 2026
Many agencies are aware of the October 2026 deadline but have not fully accounted for how long a compliant programme takes to establish. Based on experience working with estate and letting agencies across the UK, the realistic timeline is:
- Policy drafting and legal review: 2–4 weeks
- Technology procurement and deployment: 1–2 weeks (The Sentry deploys in under one hour)
- Staff communication and training: 4–6 weeks to reach full team
- Embedded compliance culture: 3–6 months of consistent use to generate the audit trail evidence required
An agency that begins implementing in September 2026 will arrive at the October 2026 deadline with one month of compliance evidence. A tribunal will not find that persuasive. An agency that begins now will arrive with six months of documented, operational compliance — a materially stronger defence.
How The Sentry addresses every ERA 2025 obligation
The Sentry was updated following the April 2026 ERA 2025 provisions and satisfies each component of the ‘all reasonable steps’ standard:
Private incident reporting channel — Encrypted, mobile-first, and structurally isolated from the management hierarchy of the person being reported. Satisfies the whistleblowing-compliant disclosure requirement from day one.
Live safety session with monitored alarm — Dedicated safety technology that provides instantaneous, monitored alerting. Not a standard phone call. Not a WhatsApp message. A purpose-built system that functions in the high-pressure, time-critical scenarios that property viewings create.
Tamper-proof audit trail — Every session is automatically logged, providing the legally defensible evidence base that demonstrates ‘all reasonable steps’ on every working day.
Compliance documentation pack — Updated EHRC-aligned policy templates, staff communication materials, and risk assessment frameworks, all calibrated for the property sector and updated to reflect ERA 2025 obligations.
One-hour deployment — There is no operational or logistical excuse for delayed compliance. The Sentry can be deployed across an entire estate agency on the same day an account is opened.
Rebecca Evans is COO and Co-Founder of The Sentry, a mobile-based safety and reporting platform that protects lone workers and helps employers evidence compliance with UK employment law. Rebecca is an ex-letting agent of 18 years and writes regularly on employment law obligations for the property sector. Her piece on these changes was published in The Negotiator in August 2025.