A leading HR director has called on ministers and policy makers to see for themselves the "Byzantine" procedures that employers have to navigate to deal with disruptive employees.

Reacting to the Government’s proposals to reform the employment tribunals system, set out in its Resolving workplace disputes consultation released last week, Broadway HR director Helen Giles told HRthat the reforms "miss the point".

"They don’t take account of the massive expense and disruption that is being caused for thousands of voluntary organisations and public bodies by the exploitation in the workplace of discrimination laws and other rights that don’t require any length of service at all to trump a claim at employment tribunals," she said.

"What I see on a daily basis being played out in charities is more suited to the pages of Alice in Wonderland than the world of a 21^st century social business trying to deliver efficiently on the Big Society."

Giles has been vociferous in her criticism of the employment tribunal system. In a recent blog she described it as a "runaway train, having been hijacked by vexatious litigants who have learned to play the system to wring thousands out of their employers in settlement of spurious claims".

She invited ministers and policy makers to see the way the "rights of the many" are being "trampled on by the sizeable minority of those who can’t or won’t perform and behave in the workplace".

"Only then will they have the information they need to bring about meaningful reforms," she said.

Employers have until 20 April to respond to the consultation. As part of the proposals, employment tribunals would be able to impose financial penalties on those employers found to have breached an individual’s rights, payable to the Exchequer.