Michael Abbott inherited the file from Nicole Newall. Newall, in turn, inherited it from Gemma Penk. Therefore, the TCAP audit now moves backwards to the Senior HR Generalist who helped turn sickness management into a secret exit conversation, then coated the whole grubby performance in the language of support.
The Gemma Penk Cummins story does not require pantomime horns or a sinister performance in the witness box. Penk could appear perfectly pleasant because smarm usually does. However, a polished manner does not bleach documented conduct, and a sympathetic little head tilt cannot turn an exit ambush into employee care.
Her own witness statement supplies the core of this article. Contemporaneous emails expose the timing and the calculated vagueness. Meanwhile, the documents surrounding the process provide a fucking farce so complete that satire barely needs to clock in.
Gemma Penk Cummins : Meet The “Master Investigator”
At the relevant time, Penk worked as a Senior HR Generalist at the Darlington Engine Plant. In May 2023, according to paragraph 3 of her statement, Cummins appointed her “Master Investigator – UK and Europe”. She said that role involved managing the investigation process for Ethics cases.
That magnificent title deserves to sit under a spotlight while we examine her work. After all, this particular master investigator brings us a concealed meeting agenda, late-created notes, a letter that knew the future, repeated pay errors and an unanswered drafting prompt abandoned inside her own statement.
It is less Master Investigator and more regional manager of evidential slapstick. Still, Cummins apparently saw the performance and thought Europe deserved access to it.
First Came The Capability Threat
On 25 July 2022, I sent Cummins a fit note covering mental-health absence. It referred to new antidepressant medication and requested day shifts while I adjusted. The following day, Chris Paling invited me to a Capability Review meeting scheduled for 28 July.
Penk’s statement explains the purpose once the corporate perfume evaporates. Paragraph 159 says the meeting would discuss my continuing absences and whether Cummins might terminate my employment if I could not maintain satisfactory attendance.
I asked Cummins to obtain Occupational Health advice first. Consequently, the company postponed the meeting and submitted an OH referral on 26 July covering anxiety, depression and IBS.
Even so, Penk wrote on 28 July that the “decision has not been predetermined”. Apparently, the decision meeting could arrive first while the medical evidence jogged along behind it. Nothing predetermined here, dear employee; please ignore the dismissal-shaped silhouette already standing behind the curtain.
The Catch-Up With A Concealed Agenda
By 12 August, I told Penk that an increased antidepressant dose had been sedating but that I expected to return on Monday. She replied with a face-to-face “catch up” supposedly outside the absence process, which was HR varnish for a discussion about leaving the company.
I asked who would attend and what the meeting concerned. Penk named Operations Manager Wayne Anderson, yet she did not disclose the subject. Instead, she said the meeting would “review next steps”.
Naturally, that non-answer did not reduce the anxiety, so I asked again. Meetings made me anxious, I explained, and a proper agenda would let me prepare and decide whether to bring a colleague.
Still, Penk kept the subject tucked behind her back. On 16 August, she wrote that she needed to speak in person rather than by email. When I again described the distress caused by the vague agenda, her response reached premium-grade HR smarm: I did not need to prepare; she would reveal the topic at the beginning; then I could decide whether to involve a colleague.
In other words, walk into the room first and discover the trap afterwards. This was not a birthday surprise. It was an HR meeting held on my second day back while I was adjusting to antidepressants, and Penk knew perfectly well what waited inside it.
More importantly, Gemma Penk Cummins already knew the concealed topic. Her statement says she and manager Nicola Teasdale had discussed offering a severance package because the live absence process “could result in his employment being terminated”. Penk also says Operations Leader Steve Morley agreed that they should try a without-prejudice conversation.
So, while I repeatedly asked for an agenda, Penk knew Cummins wanted to discuss my departure. Nevertheless, she called it a catch-up, placed it “outside” the absence process and refused to put the real subject in an email. That is the smarm in its purest form: conceal the blade, soften the vocabulary and act puzzled when the employee notices blood.
Transparency never entered the building. This was an exit ambush wearing an HR lanyard and practising its concerned face in the lift mirror.
“No Pressure”, Apart From The Pressure
Paragraph 182 of Penk’s statement says Cummins made clear that the severance discussion was merely an option and that I faced “no pressure”. There is the phrase every employee longs to hear from the people running a dismissal-capable process: no pressure. Penk delivers it with the oily confidence of someone describing the weather while quietly locking the doors.
Before the mystery meeting, Cummins had already invited me to a Capability Review that could end in dismissal. Penk’s statement expressly says the severance offer was considered as an alternative to continuing that process. Moreover, I had asked for OH input because the company had moved towards a decision before obtaining it.
The choice was therefore not floating in a vacuum. One route involved discussing an agreed exit. Otherwise, I returned to a process that Penk and Teasdale understood could terminate my employment.
Calling that “no pressure” is like putting a fire exit beside a furnace and congratulating the occupant on having options. The wording is technically soothing and substantively bollocks.
Two Days Later, I Was Off Again
Timing mattered because I had just returned. On 22 August, I told Penk that the 16 August meeting had knocked me backwards and that I was not coping. My email was long, emotional and painfully clear: I wanted treatment, recovery and the chance to keep my job.
Penk pointed me towards the third-party Employee Assistance Programme, supplying the ceremonial wellbeing garnish. However, the same reply warned that Cummins could stop enhanced sick pay if I did not attend OH and future absence meetings. It also said OH had to happen before the decision meeting that would follow.
Later that day, Penk offered a possible telephone appointment at 14:15 in an email sent at 14:03 local time. I was asleep after a night spent worrying and saw it later. Her statement dutifully records the missed twelve-minute opportunity, as though an ambush appointment proved something beyond HR’s contempt for clocks.
Support had now acquired a decision meeting, a pay warning and a stopwatch. Presumably the EAP’s leaflet made the arrangement humane.
The SAL3 Notes That Took The Scenic Route
I had requested the notes from the 6 May SAL3 meeting, including for use at Occupational Health. Penk finally attached them on 22 August.
Crucially, the toilet-access concern did not materialise after I saw those late notes. On 13 July, more than a month before Penk supplied them, I emailed Holly Palarm and said I was fit for work. I asked for assurance that I could remain close to toilet facilities and leave the production line at short notice, in line with the existing OH recommendations.
The following day, I explained that I wanted managers and team leaders simply made aware of the adjustments. I did not want to keep holding meetings in which I had to discuss a sensitive and embarrassing bowel condition whenever somebody different took charge. On 15 July, while still trying to resolve matters at working level, I asked Palarm to bring the two relevant OH reports and any available SAL3 minutes to the proposed meeting.
That chronology matters. I raised the practical problem informally, confirmed that I wanted to work and tried to secure a quiet operational solution before I had even seen Penk’s version of the SAL3 notes. The distinction between suitable toilet access at Hot Test and unsuitable access elsewhere was not a grievance invented after disclosure; it was consistent with the workplace concern I had already tried to rectify.
Those notes say I felt the distance to toilet facilities was fine. Yet I immediately challenged the omission of an important distinction: Hot Test was close enough, while the Head of Line position was too far away. Family members had overheard the telephone meeting, and I asked for the file’s modification details because the neat little summary did not reflect my recollection.
Penk’s later statement says she did not intentionally omit anything and simply could not recall the missing qualification. How terribly convenient. That remains her account, and TCAP cannot independently reconstruct every spoken word; however, the supplied PDF creates another problem that requires no recollection at all.
Its metadata records a creation date of 22 August 2022—the same day Penk finally emailed it and more than three months after the meeting. Therefore, the PDF provided to me was not a PDF created at the time of the 6 May conversation.
An earlier untouched Word document cannot rescue this. TCAP also obtained the underlying Word file, and that record had itself been edited after concerns arose over the notes. Penk’s explanation was that she reviewed the three-month-old document and corrected a spelling error.
Pause over that magnificent excuse. Concerns had already been raised about the contents of the notes, yet Penk reopened the contested record months after the meeting to repair one elderly spelling mistake.
A spelling correction could be innocent in isolation. However, Penk’s explanation confirms the important point: the underlying record was modified after the event. Without an untouched pre-edit version or a complete tracked-changes history, her assurance cannot prove that spelling was the only alteration.
The issue is therefore no longer whether someone merely converted a pristine old document into PDF format. By Penk’s own account, she later reviewed and edited the underlying record before producing that Word file. That is shoddy evidential housekeeping wrapped in breathtaking self-assurance.
For a future Master Investigator, the appropriate response to a contested record was preservation, version control and a transparent audit trail. Apparently, mastery instead meant polishing a three-month-old typo inside disputed evidence and expecting everyone to admire the housekeeping.
The 10 May Letter That Knew About 25 May
The accompanying SAL3 outcome letter performs an even better trick. It bears the date 10 May 2022. Nevertheless, its absence list includes “25.05.2022 – Present”.
Unless Cummins HR had access to a fucking time machine, a letter genuinely completed on 10 May could not describe an absence beginning fifteen days later. The PDF metadata records its creation on 18 June, which fits the document’s clairvoyance rather better. Even Mystic Meg would have left a cleaner audit trail.
This does not, by itself, identify who inserted each line or when every underlying draft changed. It does prove that readers should not treat the supplied document as a clean, contemporaneous 10 May record. Penk’s statement refers to the notes and outcome letter together but never confronts that impossible chronology.
The mystery is not subtle. Its printed date and its contents cannot both describe a document finalised on 10 May. Yet the Master Investigator’s statement strolls past this chronological corpse without so much as checking for a pulse.
“[DID YOU RESPOND?]”
Then we reach paragraph 192 of the Gemma Penk Cummins witness statement. Penk says she emailed on 25 August and promised to collate one response to the issues I had raised.
Immediately after that sentence, the statement contains this unresolved drafting prompt:
[DID YOU RESPOND?]
There it sits in capital letters, like the drafter briefly wandered into the document and asked the only useful question. Nobody removed it. Nor did anyone insert an answer. The copy held by TCAP also contains blank signature and date lines.
Perhaps Cummins served a later signed version elsewhere. TCAP will correct the record if the company produces one. Still, the document provided for this case is a 30-page slab of confidence theatre that calls Penk a Master Investigator while preserving the drafter’s unanswered question about whether she ever supplied the promised response.
Sometimes satire is redundant because the witness statement has already mugged itself.
Payroll Joins The Support Process
At the end of August, my pay was wrong. Even Penk’s statement cannot smarm its way around that central fact, so it explains a chain of failures instead.
The system had not been updated when I returned. Issues also existed in May and July over the point at which sick pay should have reduced. Subsequently, the analyst calculating the correction went on holiday, another analyst stepped in and discovered that the calculation was wrong again.
Penk’s own September emails confirm “processing errors”, amended payslips for July, August and September, and a further payment needed to correct the manual adjustment. One advanced-run correction also failed to pull through properly. Meanwhile, the money arriving in my account did not match what I expected from the documents.
Nevertheless, HR continued linking OH attendance to pay and capability progression. On 21 September, Penk apologised for the delay while payroll worked through its errors. In the next paragraph, she asked me to attend OH the following morning.
That juxtaposition matters. Cummins could repeatedly fuck up the wages of a mentally unwell employee, take weeks to explain the figures and still present his reaction as an engagement problem. Penk occupied the middle of that spectacle, dispensing deadlines with one hand while payroll searched the sofa for the correct calculation with the other.
When Cummins Errors Became The Gemma Penk Tragedy
Those closing paragraphs are where the Penk smarm reaches industrial strength. She agrees with Michael Abbott that I was difficult to deal with. According to Penk, the barrage of emails felt “awful” (you ARE awful), left her overwhelmed and made her relieved when she no longer handled the case.
To be fair, I sent many emails. Some were repetitive, angry or written while I was distressed and being deliberately ignored. Sending that volume was not tactically elegant, and TCAP does not need to recast me as a serene correspondence monk floating above Outlook.
However, Penk’s very next paragraph admits mistakes involving my pay, the missing SSP1 and a sick-pay entitlement letter. The statement also documents the severance plan, the capability threat and the incorrectly calculated correction. Volume did not invent those events.
Her discomfort may have been genuine. I frankly do not care whether it was. Yet the statement uses it to drag the spotlight away from why the inbox kept filling: basic questions remained unanswered, records were disputed, wages were wrong and the supposedly supportive process kept slithering towards dismissal.
By paragraph 244, Penk says I blamed everyone and accepted no personal responsibility. Behold the final dollop of smarm: Cummins made the errors, HR managed the pressure, payroll mangled the corrections, and Penk diagnosed the employee’s character. That is a breathtaking closing flourish from a statement forced to admit several company failures.
Still, refusing responsibility appears to be corporate muscle memory at Cummins. TCAP has seen the same reflex around veteran employees shown the door: the company action remains regrettably necessary, the process remains unimpeachable and wrongdoing apparently belongs to somebody else.
Even a record environmental settlement could not prise an admission loose. Cummins agreed to more than $2 billion in penalties and remedies over illegal emissions software affecting hundreds of thousands of diesel engines. Regulators said the affected engines produced excess nitrogen oxides with serious public-health consequences; Cummins nevertheless maintained that it admitted no wrongdoing.
So, whether the subject is a veteran losing his livelihood or citizens breathing pollution from engines fitted with unlawful software, the corporate confession remains the same: Cummins did nothing wrong. Apparently, personal responsibility is a value reserved for sick employees receiving incorrect wages.
Reverse Engineering The Cummins Machine
Penk says she handed the case to Nicole Newall on 4 November. Two paragraphs later, the same statement says she emailed Newall on 4 October to say Newall was taking over. That discrepancy may be a simple typo. Unfortunately, this masterpiece already contains a solicitor’s unanswered prompt, blank execution fields and enough documentary chaos to make “simple typo” feel like the house style.
Either way, the handover matters. Newall inherited the capability process and made the later Occupational Health referral examined in the previous TCAP article. Abbott then inherited the consequences and presented the breakdown as his professional burden.
Working backwards exposes the machine. Abbott did not appear from nowhere, while Newall did not receive a neutral file. Penk helped construct the route into capability, participated in the exit approach and then passed the growing mess onwards with her concerned-professional routine apparently intact.
TCAP Verdict
Gemma Penk did not need to snarl at the hearing to qualify for scrutiny. Smarm was always the more useful costume. Her documented conduct is more than enough.
She withheld the subject of an exit-related meeting from an employee who repeatedly explained that uncertainty was worsening his anxiety. On his second day back, she participated in a severance approach while he adjusted to antidepressants. Afterwards, she paired OH attendance with sick-pay warnings and a capability decision process.
On her watch, disputed notes arrived through a PDF created months after the meeting. A supposedly 10 May letter described an absence starting on 25 May. Payroll errors multiplied, while her statement transformed the employee’s persistent objections into the tragic tale of an HR adviser with too many emails.
Finally, the statement left one devastating question unanswered in plain sight: did you respond?
TCAP verdict: the pleasant surface makes the conduct more contemptible, not less. The Master Investigator helped build an exit corridor, labelled it support and then acted personally burdened when the employee inside it refused to walk quietly towards the door.
Cummins and Gemma Penk are invited to identify any factual error. TCAP will publish a meaningful correction or response. However, another ladle of HR syrup about support, wellbeing and difficult correspondence will receive precisely the contempt it has earned.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources (held by TCAP)
- Gemma Penk witness statement in Thompson v Cummins Limited, Newcastle Employment Tribunal case 2501831/2022, paragraphs 1–244. Copy held by TCAP.
- Email correspondence involving Gemma Penk, Lee Thompson, Chris Paling and Cummins HR, July–September 2022. Copies held by TCAP.
- Thompson, Lee – SAL3 Meeting Notes 6-May-2022, including PDF metadata. Copy held by TCAP.
- Thompson, Lee – SAL 3 Outcome Letter 6-May-2022, dated 10 May 2022, including PDF metadata. Copy held by TCAP.
- Gemma Penk and Cummins payroll correspondence concerning amended July, August and September 2022 pay. Copies held by TCAP.