The 2008 Sex Discrimination Act 1975 (Amendment) Regulations were intended to bring UK legislation into line with the European Union Directive of 2002 (following the Equal Opportunities Commission’s successful judicial review of March 2007).
They defined harassment as sex-related, and introduced a new section into the Act regarding ‘Liability of employers for failing to protect employees from third party harassment’:
… [T]he circumstances in which an employer is to be treated as subjecting a woman to harassment shall include those where—
(a)a third party subjects the woman to harassment in the course of her employment, and
(b)the employer has failed to take such steps as would have been reasonably practicable to prevent the third party from doing so.
[This] does not apply unless the employer knows that the woman has been subject to harassment in the course of her employment on at least two other occasions by a third party.
Employers’ Liability for third party harassment was subsequently incorporated into the Equality Act 2010 (section 40(2)-(4)).
Yet these sections were not in place for long – since they were specifically repealed three years later by the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 which sought to reduce ‘legislative burdens’ on employers.