When Care Is Outsourced, Accountability Cannot Be
The Mental Health Act 2025 is not a piece of legislation.
The Mental Health Act 2025 is not a piece of legislation most hospitality leaders will instinctively turn their attention to. It sits, at first glance, within the world of healthcare, regulation and legal accountability. But when you move beyond the legal language and consider what this change is really doing, it becomes clear that this is not just a healthcare story. It is a leadership story. At its core, this is about responsibility and where it truly sits when services are delivered by others.
The Bigger Shift Behind This Issue
The Act, which received Royal Assent in December 2025, amends the Mental Health Act 1983 rather than replacing it. While much of the legislation is still to come into force, key provisions are already live, including changes that extend the reach of the Human Rights Act to certain private providers delivering NHS funded or NHS arranged care. On the surface, this appears technical. In reality, it is a deliberate move to close a long standing accountability gap, in which individuals receiving care in private settings did not always benefit from the same protections as those in public services.
That gap did not exist because anyone set out to create it. It existed because responsibility had become fragmented across systems, contracts and organisational boundaries. The legislation is now correcting that, but the lesson for leaders reaches far beyond the legal framework. It challenges a mindset that still quietly exists in many organisations: once something is outsourced, responsibility moves with it. It does not. Delivery may move, contracts may move, people may sit on different payrolls, but responsibility does not disappear.
The Real Impact on Hospitality Teams
In hospitality, this is not an abstract idea. Outsourcing is part of how we operate every day. Cleaning, security, maintenance, agency staffing, recruitment support, training partners, wellbeing services and occupational health provision are all examples of where delivery sits outside the core employment structure. These relationships are often necessary and, when managed well, highly effective. They bring flexibility, specialist capability and operational resilience into environments that demand both consistency and adaptability.
However, what they also introduce is distance. There is a distance between the decision to outsource and the day to day delivery of that service. There is a distance between policy and practice. There is a distance between leadership intent and the lived experience of the people delivering or receiving that service. Within that distance, accountability can begin to blur, not through intent, but through assumption. It becomes easy to believe that someone else is closer to the detail, that someone else is managing the standards, or that someone else will intervene if something goes wrong.
Where Many Hospitality Businesses Struggle
The difficulty is that when something does go wrong, those assumptions collapse very quickly. At that point, the question is rarely confined to contractual definitions or organisational charts. It is not simply about who employed the individual or which company held the agreement. It becomes a far more fundamental question about leadership. Who should have known, and who should have acted sooner?
Accountability gaps do not appear because organisations lack process. In most cases, contracts, policies, onboarding frameworks, and governance structures are in place. The gap appears because responsibility is distributed across multiple functions, each with a partial view of the whole. One team commissions the service, another manages the contract, operations oversees the day to day relationship, and HR sits at the edge of people related risk without always having full visibility. When issues arise, they often emerge in those spaces between ownership, where no single function feels fully accountable for the human impact.
What HR Must Get Right
HR has a critical role to play here, but not in the way it is sometimes positioned. HR cannot and should not own every outsourced relationship. That responsibility sits with the business. What HR must do is shape how people related risk is understood and governed across those relationships.
Compliance as a Foundation
This means asking better questions. Who is responsible for the human impact of this service? How do we know that standards are being upheld in practice, not just agreed in principle? What happens when something goes wrong, and who is accountable for resolving it? Vulnerability demands greater oversight, earlier intervention and more deliberate governance to ensure standards do not slip between contractual lines.
People Experience Beyond Contracts
It also means moving beyond policy as the primary tool of protection. Policies are important, but they do not create safety on their own. A safeguarding policy that managers do not understand does not safeguard anyone. A wellbeing policy that excludes agency workers or contractors does not support wellbeing. A set of organisational values that apply only to directly employed colleagues does not create a consistent culture.
Transparency Builds Trust
HR’s influence lies in connecting these dots. It sits in ensuring that people considerations are built into how services are designed, procured and managed. It challenges assumptions and creates clarity where ambiguity might otherwise exist. Leaders who understand this build environments where early signs are recognised, conversations are encouraged, and support is visible and accessible to everyone.
Why Hospitality Has More at Stake Than It Thinks
Hospitality is uniquely exposed to this challenge because of the way our operations are structured. A single guest experience may involve multiple employers. A room may be cleaned by a contractor, secured by a third party, maintained by an external engineer and overseen by an in house team. From the guest’s perspective, it is one seamless experience. From a leadership perspective, it must also be one standard.
Our sector provides opportunities for individuals at very different stages of their working lives. Young people entering employment for the first time, apprentices building skills, individuals returning to work after illness, and those navigating personal or mental health challenges all form part of our workforce. Many of these individuals may not feel confident challenging poor practice or raising concerns. They rely more heavily on the systems around them, which means those systems must be designed with care, not just compliance.
The Strategic Opportunity for HR Leaders
It would be easy to view regulatory changes as a pure compliance issue. But what this highlights is a broader leadership truth. Accountability is not defined by organisational charts. It is defined by influence.
If your organisation commissions, funds, directs or benefits from a service, you have a responsibility to care about how that service is delivered. That responsibility does not need to be framed in legal terms to be real. It exists in the expectations you set, the standards you uphold and the behaviours you tolerate. This is where leadership is tested most. Not in the areas where responsibility is clear and direct, but in the spaces where it is shared, complex and easy to overlook.
In a Nutshell
What has changed: The conversation around accountability is shifting, closing gaps where responsibility is fragmented across multiple providers.
Why it matters: Outsourcing creates operational distance, making it easy to assume someone else is managing standards and wellbeing.
What happens if leaders ignore it: When issues arise, assumptions collapse, revealing failures of oversight, clarity and leadership.
What improves when they act early: Organisations establish a single standard of culture and care that applies consistently across the entire operation.
Key Takeaways for Hospitality HR Leaders
Never assume responsibility moves with the contract; accountability remains with the business.
Ensure policies protect everyone in the building, including agency workers and contractors.
Ask difficult questions about human impact during the procurement and management of outsourced services.
Build a culture where standards of behaviour apply consistently to the entire operation, regardless of employment status.
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