This week, retailers across the UK are focused on violence and abuse against shop staff. That focus lands at a useful moment. Since Friday 30th October 2026, employers in Great Britain can also be liable when customers, guests or other members of the public harass their people at work, unless they took all reasonable steps to prevent it.
On paper those look like two separate problems: retail crime on one side, employment law on the other. On the shop floor they share the same weak point. The colleague who saw it often never reports it.
The British Retail Consortium's Crime Report 2026, covering 1st September 2024 to 31st August 2025, found around 590,000 incidents of violence and abuse against shopworkers that year, or about 1,600 a day. That is down from about 2,000 a day the year before, but still far above the pre-pandemic level of 455 a day. The Government's retail crime factsheet, citing that report, also notes that only a small proportion of retail crime reaches the police.
Those figures cover incidents serious enough for retailers to count. Plenty of everyday abuse never makes it that far. Staff finish the shift, tell a supervisor if they are lucky, and get on with the next customer, because the formal system takes too long, needs a login, or feels like making a fuss. Hospitality sees the same pattern on the late shift.
Since Friday 30th October 2026, two related changes to the Equality Act 2010 have been in force in England, Wales and Scotland. They do not apply in Northern Ireland, which has its own equality law.
First, employers must take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their employees, not just some of them.
Second, an employer can be liable if a third party, such as a customer or guest, harasses an employee in the course of their work, unless the employer took all reasonable steps to prevent it. That covers sexual harassment and harassment related to age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. It does not cover marriage and civil partnership, or pregnancy and maternity, as such.
There is still no fixed government list of what "all reasonable steps" means. Regulations that could spell them out have not been made. Until then, each employer has to judge what is reasonable for their size, sector and sites, using guidance from Acas and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
The practical test is simple enough. If a customer harasses someone on your till or behind your bar, what evidence do you have that you made it easy to report, that you recorded it, and that you did something about it?
Policies, posters and training matter. So does telling customers that abuse of staff will not be tolerated. None of that helps if the person on the floor cannot raise what just happened before the next customer arrives.
Acas advice on preventing harassment includes monitoring and recording incidents and the actions taken. The EHRC's technical guidance has long pointed employers towards a reporting system that lets workers raise an issue either anonymously or in name. Both point to the same gap: a route that works for deskless staff, in the moment.
That is why retail crime and the harassment duty belong in the same conversation. Loss-prevention, people and operations teams all need more of the everyday incidents that never reach the systems they already use. The starting point is the colleague who saw it.
Most operators already have somewhere for serious incidents to go. The problem is the smaller, repeated issues that never enter those systems at all.
I run Continual, a UK reporting platform. Every colleague can report in seconds by QR code, with no login, in their own language, and anonymously if they choose. AI analysis runs across every report so patterns show up earlier. It sits alongside the incident, HR or case-management systems you already have; it does not replace them. It can be one of the steps you take.
Look at one busy site and ask three questions. How does a colleague on the late shift actually report abuse or harassment today? How long does it take, and do they need a login? What happens to that report after it is raised, and who across the group can see the pattern?
If most of it never leaves the floor, the duty that came into force on 30th October will be hard to show, and so will any serious attempt to cut retail crime and abuse.
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