Long-awaited legislation to toughen up laws on sexual harassment in the workplace looks set to be shelved after a flurry of amendments from Conservative peers that has choked its progress through the UK parliament.
The government-backed private members’ bill is designed to ensure companies take “all reasonable steps” to proactively prevent sexual harassment in workplaces, not only by colleagues but also by clients or customers.
More than 40 amendments have been added by Tory backbench peers in recent days, which would weaken or dilute the main obligation of the relevant bill, for example by excluding “vexatious, frivolous or malicious” claims. In effect, this will “time out the bill” given how little parliamentary time is allocated to private members’ bills.
Charity groups and unions have urged ministers to prioritise the legislation amid a huge scandal at the CBI business organisation, which is facing an existential crisis over harassment and rape allegations.
Jemima Olchawski, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, a UK women’s rights charity, accused Tory peers of seeking to “wreck” the bill.
“It’s all very well the government saying they won’t engage with the CBI while this is going on, what we should be seeing is a serious commitment to sexual harassment not happening, not being outraged when it does,” she said.
“They should be seriously getting behind the only serious legislative change we’ve seen in Britain to come out of the #MeToo movement.”
Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, said it would be “utterly shameful” if the government allowed the bill to fall by the wayside. He added that ministers seemed to be “backsliding” under pressure from backbenchers.
The government first carried out a consultation on sexual harassment in the workplace nearly four years ago. As many as one in five adults in Britain have experienced some form of sexual harassment at work, according to an Opinium survey.
At present, employers are potentially liable for incidents of sexual harassment unless they have taken “all reasonable steps” to prevent them.
In a response published in July 2021 ministers said they would impose a new proactive duty on employers to take “all reasonable steps” to prevent sexual harassment in workplaces in advance.
Another change would be that employers would not only be responsible for preventing harassment from other colleagues but also from customers and clients.
Ministers had originally planned to include the policy in a broader “employment bill” but that was dropped more than a year ago.
Instead, they have given their support to a cross-party “private members bill” led by Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse called the “Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill”.
But the legislation is foundering in parliament after the late addition last week of the Tory amendments, which could see the bill now “wither on the vine”, according to Hobhouse.
In theory, the amendments mean the bill will have to “ping pong” between the Commons and Lords until both chambers agree. But in practice, if the private members’ bill is sent back to the Commons — and has no time allocated — it will sit unfinished until the end of the session at which point it falls.
A government aide admitted the timetable would make it hard to push through the bill: “The programme is pretty tight now . . . it’s in a very tight place.”
One Tory peer behind some of the amendments said they were “concerned at the implications of the bill for free speech” and wanted more time to debate the legislation.
Hobhouse said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had promised to support the bill. “If the government is serious about stopping sexual harassment in the workplace they have two options, either put pressure on the rebels in the Lords to withdraw the amendments . . . or take it on as a government bill,” she said.