In the week that employers were expecting details on government plans for flexible parental leave, confirmed in the Queen’s Speech, the Beecroft Report on employment law hit the headlines again. Commissioned by Downing Street, the report was widely leaked before its publication last week, firing a furore of political comment.

The report recommends scrapping or delaying parental leave reform and making the extension of flexible working non-statutory. It also suggests rescinding provisions in the Equality Act that make employers responsible for the harassment of employees by colleagues or customers. Repealing the latter provision is now the subject of a consultation, along with proposals to repeal tribunals’ power to make “wider recommendations” on company policies and procedures following a successful discrimination claim, and doing away with the statutory employer questionnaire used in discrimination claims.

Audrey Williams, Eversheds’ head of discrimination law, has some sympathy with repealing provisions on third-party harassment because there have been few challenges using it, and arguably it duplicates an employer’s duty of care towards its employees. But she is troubled by the questionnaire disposal, particularly over what might replace it.

“At the moment we have certainty – a set time frame within which an employer has to reply or risk a tribunal’s adverse inference. If this is replaced with a general ability to ask questions at various stages, employees will have several bites of the cherry,” she said.

The “wider recommendations” provisions have been used in a “minuscule number of cases” so their scrapping is largely symbolic, said Squire Sanders’ London head of employment David Whincup. He says the small business exemptions idea was shown not to work in Australia: less than 1 per cent of claims were eliminated because those with grievances claimed discrimination or whistleblowing instead of unfair dismissal. He thinks doing away with employer liability for colleague harassment, not just by third parties, “a huge change and unlikely to succeed. It would simply license harassment. This is blue-sky thinking in the worst sense of that term.”