The Act contains a number of measures to promote fairness and equality at work.
	Organisations with 250 or more employees have been required to publish specific gender pay gap (GPG) data annually on a government service since 2017. Government analysis found that, as of June 2019, roughly only half of in-scope employers had published an action plan detailing the concrete steps they were taking to narrow the gap. The Act gives the Secretary of State the power to require employers to publish an equality action plan alongside the disclosure required by section 78 of the Equality Act 2010.
	The Act also enables regulations to require the same organisations to inform the government of those organisations, also required to report, which they received outsourced work from.
	The Equality Act 2010 provides legal protections against sexual harassment in the workplace. Despite this, persistent reports and revelations that have emerged in recent years indicate that it remains a problem within the workplace. This Act therefore strengthens protections against harassment by introducing three amendments to the Equality Act 2010’s harassment provisions.
	The Worker Protection (Amendment to the Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 came into force on 26 October 2024. This introduced a legal duty on employers to take "reasonable steps" to prevent sexual harassment of their employees. This Act amends the duty to require employers to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent sexual harassment of their employees. This means that employers must take "all" reasonable steps rather than simply reasonable steps to fulfil their duty under section 40A of the Equality Act 2010. The amended duty mirrors the concept of the "all reasonable steps" defence in section 109(4) of the Equality Act 2010. What steps are deemed reasonable for an employer to have taken will depend on the circumstances of each individual case; however, an employer will have taken all reasonable steps if there are no further steps that they could reasonably have been expected to take.
	This Act also amends the Equality Act 2010 to introduce an obligation on employers not to permit harassment of their employees by third parties.
	In addition, this Act introduces a delegated power enabling a Minister of the Crown to specify steps that are to be regarded as "reasonable" for the purposes of meeting the obligation set out in the Equality Act 2010 to take "all reasonable steps" to prevent sexual harassment. The regulations may also require an employer to have regard to specified matters when taking those steps. An employer that wants to show that it has taken all reasonable steps should take the steps set out in the regulations; as well as all other preventative steps that it is reasonable for them to take in the particular circumstances. This power allows the Government to make regulations at a later date.
	For a worker to qualify for protection for blowing the whistle they must make a "protected disclosure", namely, a disclosure of information which they reasonably believe is in the public interest and tends to show a past, present, or likely future relevant failure falling into one or more of the categories listed under section 43B of the ERA 1996 ERA 1996This Act adds sexual harassment to the relevant failures listed under section 43B. Where a worker makes a disclosure qualifying for protection, they will have legal recourse if they are subjected to detriment or, if they are an employee, are unfairly dismissed, as a result of their disclosure.
	The Act also voids any provision in a Non-Disclosure Agreement between a worker and employer which seeks to stop a worker from speaking out about harassment and discrimination they have experienced.
Equality at Work