The Cepac Files : Morrisons And The Dirty Supplier Problem

Morrisons has had enough public trouble with fairness, work, governance and supply-chain standards without adding Cepac Ltd to the trolley. TCAP says Cepac is a supplier accused of disability discrimination, litigation bullying and using conduct theatre to dodge a merits hearing. Maybe Morrisons did not know before. It does now. So what is it going to do about the packaging trail?

The First Lesson

One of my earliest memories of discrimination was not a statute book, a tribunal bundle or some polished corporate inclusion page written by a consultant with a LinkedIn grin.

It was EastEnders.

I remember being a young’un, watching it like families did, and seeing Mark Fowler after his HIV status became known. The Queen Vic was not just a pub in that storyline. It was the room. The public square. The place where fear, gossip and ignorance stopped being private thoughts and became treatment.

Peggy Mitchell gave him the sort of treatment that sticks in your head when you are young enough to know it is ugly before you are old enough to know what section of what Act it might breach.

That was the lesson.

Discrimination is not always announced with a memo. Sometimes it is a look. A rumour. A process. A door closing. A person being made into the problem because everyone else would rather protect the room.

And decades later, here we are.

Different condition and workplace. And supplier. Same filthy little reflex.

Morrisons Knows This Terrain

Morrisons does not get to act like disability at work is some exotic concept discovered in a policy refresh.

The supermarket has already been pulled into public reporting over an autistic man who worked unpaid in a Morrisons café for months, then reportedly struggled with the online onboarding process when a paid role was meant to follow. According to The Times, he had joined through Mencap’s Employ Me programme, worked unpaid for six months, then was denied paid employment after difficulty completing Morrisons’ online onboarding process. Morrisons later apologised and paid him after the matter was challenged.

That is not a minor admin hiccup. That is the classic corporate disability trap: the person can do the work, the people around them can see they can do the work, but the system still finds a way to trip them at the gate and call the trip procedure.

A disabled person can be useful to the operation, liked on the floor, capable of doing the job, and still get smashed against a process built for someone else.

So Morrisons already knows the smell.

Then There Is The Wider Stink

Morrisons also sits in the broader supermarket equal-pay swamp, where major retailers have faced claims from predominantly female store workers comparing their pay with warehouse workers. The sector has already had a warning shot from the Next equal-pay case, where thousands of store staff won a tribunal ruling after a six-year fight.

This is the same old retail trick dressed up in different fabric. The public-facing workers get the smiles, the tills, the uniforms, the emotional labour and the corporate values posters. Somewhere else in the machine, different work gets valued differently, and the lawyers arrive to explain why the gap is apparently just business reality with a spreadsheet.

Then there is Paula Vennells. Morrisons had the former Post Office boss on its board until she resigned from Morrisons and Dunelm after the Horizon scandal exploded through the courts and public life. That scandal was one of the great British examples of institutional cruelty dressed up as process: ordinary people crushed while the machine protected itself.

Morrisons was not the Post Office. But Morrisons gave Vennells boardroom respectability until the heat became impossible to ignore. That tells you something about what corporate governance often means in practice: reputational risk management after the damage, not moral courage before it.

And then the supply chain.

Morrisons was among the supermarkets that suspended supplies from Lincolnshire pig farms after undercover footage appeared to show serious animal abuse. The Guardian reported allegations involving piglets, sows, banned killing methods, injured animals and welfare failures at Cranswick-linked farms. Morrisons said it cared deeply about animal welfare and suspended supply while investigations took place.

Fine.

So Morrisons understands the principle. When a supplier problem becomes visible, the customer brand cannot pretend the mess ends at the farm gate, factory door or procurement spreadsheet.

Which makes Cepac the next obvious question.

Now Add Cepac

TCAP’s customer deep dive identifies Morrisons as part of Cepac’s publicly named customer trail.

That matters because Cepac Ltd is not just a packaging supplier in this series. It is the company TCAP accuses of disability discrimination, litigation bullying, and helping turn a disabled claimant’s disability-linked reactions into the story until the underlying discrimination allegations were buried before a merits hearing.

TCAP alleges that Cepac did not merely defend a claim. It bullied a disabled claimant through the process, helped manufacture a conduct narrative from disability-linked reactions, and then benefited when that narrative became the route away from the merits.

And why would Cepac want the merits avoided?

Look at the Grounds of Resistance. Look at sections 12 and 14. TCAP says the contradiction goes to the heart of what Cepac knew, when it knew it, and why the case should have been tested properly instead of smothered under conduct theatre.

That is the dirty supplier problem.

Maybe Morrisons Did Not Know

Let us be generous for one paragraph.

Maybe Morrisons did not know.

Parheps body in procurement asked. Maybe nobody in supplier compliance looked. Maybe Cepac was just another packaging supplier in the spreadsheet, clean enough on paper, cheap enough on price, useful enough to keep the shelves dressed and the products moving.

Fine.

That excuse has now expired.

Morrisons knows now. Or it will once this is put in front of it. And once a brand knows its supplier is accused of disability discrimination and litigation bullying, silence becomes a decision. Continuing to use that supplier becomes a decision. Funding that supplier becomes a decision.

You do not get to publish ethics language with one hand and pay a dirty supplier with the other.

The Question For Morrisons

TCAP is not alleging that Morrisons bullied the claimant.

TCAP is saying Morrisons is publicly linked to Cepac Ltd, a supplier accused of doing it.

That distinction matters. But it does not make the question disappear. It makes the question cleaner.

What is Morrisons going to do about Cepac?

Ask for an explanation?

Review the relationship?

Suspend the supplier?

Publish a position?

Or carry on buying the packaging and hope disabled customers, disabled workers and disabled applicants do not notice what is sitting behind the shelf?

Because the line is simple now.

If Morrisons uses Cepac, Morrisons funds Cepac. If Morrisons funds Cepac after being put on notice, Morrisons is helping sustain a company accused by TCAP of disability discrimination, litigation bullying and using conduct theatre to avoid a merits hearing.

That is not neutral procurement.

That is disability discrimination in the supply chain.

Dirty Supplier, Dirty Supply Chain

Morrisons sells trust by the aisle. Freshness. Family. Value. Community. The whole supermarket hymn sheet.

But trust is not a yellow sticker on a bag of salad. Trust is what you do when the supplier problem becomes inconvenient.

Morrisons has seen enough public mess to understand this. The unpaid autistic worker story. The equal-pay swamp. The Vennells boardroom embarrassment. The animal-welfare supply-chain horror. Again and again, the same lesson lands: what happens behind the shelf still belongs to the brand in front of it.

So here is TCAP’s first question in The Cepac Files.

Morrisons: now you know about Cepac Ltd. What are you going to do about the dirty supplier in your packaging trail?

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project