The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s updated Code of Practice for Services, Public Functions and Associations came into force on Wednesday 5th August 2026. It does not change the law but dismissing it as guidance for customer-facing teams would be a mistake.

For many organisations, the people who create equality risk for customers, service users and members are their employees. That makes this a leadership and workforce issue too.

What has changed?

The statutory Code explains how the Equality Act 2010 applies when organisations provide services, exercise public functions or operate associations. It replaces the 2011 Code and reflects significant developments in legislation and case law since then.

Importantly, courts and tribunals must take relevant parts of the Code into account. It therefore provides a useful benchmark against which an organisation’s conduct may be judged.

The Code also deals expressly with an organisation’s potential liability for employees and agents who discriminate, harass or victimise people while providing services.

What does this mean in practice?

The risk sits in the middle of the Venn diagram. The overlap where employment and service provision meet.

An employee dealing with a customer, patient, resident, passenger, member or other service user can expose your organisation to liability through what they say, do or fail to do. The phrase “in the course of employment” has a wide meaning.

The Code also reinforces an important defence. An employer may avoid liability for an employee’s unlawful act if it can show that it took all reasonable steps to prevent the employee from committing that act or acts of that description.

That turns this into a governance question. What did you do to prevent discrimination? A policy sitting unread on the intranet is unlikely to be the most compelling answer.

The issue becomes particularly important where employees make sensitive decisions about access to services, reasonable adjustments, protected characteristics or competing rights.

So, what should you do?

• Work out where the Code applies. Don’t assume this applies only to retail, hospitality, or the public sector. Identify where employees provide goods, facilities or services to the public, exercise public functions or act for an association.
• Map the higher-risk interactions. Pay particular attention to employees who make decisions about access, eligibility, complaints, reasonable adjustments, facilities, or how different customers and service users are treated.
• Review policies against operational reality. Check that equality, customer service and complaints policies reflect current law and the new Code. More importantly, check whether your employees follow them.
• Revisit training. Generic annual equality training may not prepare an employee for a difficult real-world decision. Train people around the situations they face and give managers clear routes for escalating difficult calls.
• Show your work. Record training, policy updates, communications, complaints, management interventions and remedial action. If you later rely on the reasonable steps defence, you will need evidence of what you did, not what the board assumed was happening.
• Join up HR, legal and operational teams. Employment equality and service-user equality should not operate in separate organisational silos. A decision that looks operational can quickly become a legal, employee relations and reputational problem.

The Code may have “services” in its title, but the people applying it day to day are often your workforce. Make sure you know what your people are doing in your company’s name.

Source: Services Code of Practice comes into force | EHRC