Julia Gidney
Jun 22
Rethinking Workplace Relationship Policies
When "Just Disclose It" Isn't Good Enough
Major UK regulators, the Bar Standards Board and the Bar Council, recently guided legal Chambers in England & Wales to do something most organisations haven't chosen to do: they didn't just discourage intimate relationships with the most junior and therefore vulnerable members of Chambers (pupils, mini-pupils and students), they guided Chambers to prohibit such relationships outright.
That's a striking departure from how most organisations handle this issue and it's worth asking why this was the chosen outcome and whether the reasoning behind it applies beyond the profession that adopted it.
The default most employers use
Most organisations don't ban workplace relationships and, to be fair, UK law makes an outright ban difficult to justify in most circumstances. Article 8 of the Human Rights Act protects private and family life and the blanket relationship bans seen in some other countries, including parts of the US, sit awkwardly with that legal and cultural backdrop.
So the default for most UK employers looks like this: disclose, don't ban. Tell HR, adjust the reporting line if needed, then move on.
For relationships between peers, that default makes sense but the decision of the legal regulators was specifically about relationships with a particular shape. That shape is the part worth paying attention to.
When power dynamics require attention
The decision to move from discouragement to prohibition centred on one thing: the power dynamic between the two people involved. This might be where:
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One person depends on the other for references, advancement decisions and, in some cases, whether their career continues at all.
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The junior person is often young, early in their career and motivated to comply with whomever holds influence over their future.
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The dependency is frequently total — there's no alternative supervisor, no other path to qualification or sign-off.
When one person controls the other's professional future that completely, the question of genuine consent becomes difficult to answer cleanly. Saying "yes" under those conditions doesn't carry the same weight as saying "yes" between equals.
For two decades, the Bar Council's own language described these relationships as carrying "obvious risks of coercion" but stopped short of banning them. That framing treated the relationship as potentially fine, provided both people were adults and things stayed professional enough.
The recent change rejects that assumption. Not for every relationship but specifically where the power imbalance is structural and severe.
Where Else This Logic Applies
This reasoning doesn't stop at one profession. It applies anywhere the dependency is structural and career-defining which describes a lot of ordinary workplace relationships:
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A manager deciding whether a new joiner passes probation.
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A senior mentor whose sign-off determines whether a trainee qualifies or advances.
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A line manager with direct, unilateral control over someone in their first role.
In each case, one person holds outsized influence over the other's career, often with no meaningful appeal or alternative route and the Bar isn't the first UK institution to draw this line. Universities got there first: Oxford and Cambridge already prohibit intimate relationships between staff and the students they teach or supervise, treating the academic power gap as too significant to manage through disclosure alone.
Medicine takes a similar view of the doctor-patient relationship, where using a position of clinical authority to pursue a personal relationship is already considered a breach of professional standards, though colleague-to-colleague relationships (including those between senior and junior doctors) are still handled through risk-awareness rather than an outright ban.
Seen against that backdrop, the Bar's move isn't a one-off overreaction, It's catching up to a standard some professional sectors have already set and arguably still sitting more cautiously than where medicine is now positioned.
Medicine takes a similar view of the doctor-patient relationship, where using a position of clinical authority to pursue a personal relationship is already considered a breach of professional standards, though colleague-to-colleague relationships (including those between senior and junior doctors) are still handled through risk-awareness rather than an outright ban.
Seen against that backdrop, the Bar's move isn't a one-off overreaction, It's catching up to a standard some professional sectors have already set and arguably still sitting more cautiously than where medicine is now positioned.
Why "We Have a Disclosure Policy" May Not Be Enough
Most employers outside of these sectors and facing these situations, rely on a disclosure policy (if they have a relevant policy at all) and assume that's sufficient. It might not be, particularly given that the legal duty to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment at work has been in force since October 2024.
"We have a disclosure policy" is a fine answer to give but whether it's a sufficient answer is a different question entirely, especially when the power gap is wide enough that the junior person may not feel genuinely free to disclose or to say "no" in the first place. A policy that depends on a vulnerable party speaking up is only as strong as that person's actual freedom to do so.
The Takeaway for Employers
It took a landmark independent review, undertaken by Baroness Harman, with recommendations published in late 2025 and years of documented harm, plus considerable external pressure to force this particular profession to confront the gap between policy and protections. Other employers shouldn't need the same level of prompting to ask themselves the same question.
Power imbalances don't disappear just because both parties say "yes". Any organisation with structural, career-defining dependency between two people, especially manager and new joiner, mentor and trainee, supervisor and report, should be asking whether disclosure alone is really doing the job, or whether some relationships need a clearer line than that.
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