Nicole Newall did not look sinister when she gave evidence. She seemed measured, polite and perhaps even nice. Fine. TCAP is not a fucking personality contest, and corporate harm does not need a villain’s moustache. Sometimes it arrives with a calm voice, an Assoc CIPD after its name and a witness statement explaining how upsetting the disabled employee became.
Newall’s surface manner does not erase the paperwork beneath it. The emails show a Senior HR Adviser taking control of my absence case, keeping me away from work without pay, maintaining an Occupational Health referral loaded with questions about an illness that was not causing my current absence, and repeatedly pointing towards the absence-management machinery. Her later witness statement then moved the emotional spotlight onto her.
Apparently, I was rude and confrontational. Nicole was trying her best and found it “really upsetting”.
Pass the fucking tissues. Afterwards, pass the file.
Before Michael Abbott, There Was Nicole Newall
Michael Abbott came later. His part of this story is already live: he inherited a sick employee, a damaged employment relationship and a breakdown that Cummins had learned to treat like useful case material. Before Abbott entered the room, however, Nicole Newall had already taken her turn at the controls.
Newall says Gemma Penk had managed the absence process before their relationship with me deteriorated. Another HR person was needed, so Newall arrived on 3 November 2022 as the fresh face. Her witness statement says she hoped I would trust her because we had never dealt with each other before.
That hope lasted about as long as warm butter in an engine bay.
Within hours, Newall told me I could not return until Occupational Health confirmed I was fit. My sick note had expired, yet Cummins would continue treating me as sick. Company sick pay had also expired, which meant the arrangement was brutally efficient: do not let the employee work, do not pay him, and make the route back depend on a company-controlled referral.
Newall called it process. I experienced it as financial pressure with a polite email signature.
Seven IBS Questions For The Wrong Fucking Absence
The referral contained 19 questions. A later BHSF record said that was more than the standard allocation and required a double appointment. My contemporaneous count was even more revealing: seven questions concerned IBS, while five concerned the mental-health condition actually driving my current absence.
Cummins already had two recent Occupational Health reports about my bowel condition. Those reports recommended access to nearby toilets, permission to go at short notice, and regular brief breaks for hydration and snacks. I repeatedly told Newall that the advice remained suitable. The failure, I said, was not a shortage of medical prose. It was that management had ignored the adjustments when they mattered.
Nevertheless, the referral went back into my bowel history with a torch and a clipboard. What distance from a toilet counted as near enough? How long should a hydration break last? Did IBS still require adjustments? Apparently Cummins needed another guided tour of an intestine it had already mapped twice that year.
The legitimate question is not whether an employer may ever ask for updated medical advice. Of course it may. The question is why an absence driven by mental ill health produced more IBS questions than mental-health questions, despite recent reports, while my pay and return remained locked behind attendance.
That is not a welfare conversation. It looks like file-building with a bedside manner.
The First Explanation Died, So Another One Clocked In
On 17 November, Nicole Newall gave a simple explanation. The digestive-condition questions appeared because she was new to my case and did not have access to the previous Occupational Health reports. She promised to review the questions after receiving them and to make appropriate amendments.
Then the paperwork shifted underneath her.
In a later response, Newall said the DEP team had arranged the original referral around the handover because they had access to the earlier reports. Read those positions together. The questions were supposedly there because Newall lacked the reports, yet the team that built the referral supposedly possessed them.
I then supplied Newall with the reports personally. The original explanation should have collapsed. Instead, she removed one broad question asking for a comprehensive overview of both conditions and retained the rest of the digestive interrogation.
Suddenly, lacking the reports was no longer the problem. Cummins now required fresh guidance about whether the adjustments still applied and how managers should implement them. The excuse changed clothes without leaving the room.
Nicole Newall also wrote that she had found no information suggesting the existing IBS adjustments had not been implemented. In the next breath, she said Cummins needed more detailed questions to understand what those adjustments were and how to implement them.
So which was it? Were suitable adjustments already known and implemented, or did the business still need a doctor to explain toilet access and drinking water? The file tries to eat from both plates.
The GP Letter That Her Statement Put Through A Shredder
My GP wrote on 25 November 2022. The letter said I was generally feeling better in my mental health, that a phased return had been agreed, and that Cummins had not taken that advice into consideration. It also dealt directly with the bowel issue:
His IBS irritable bowel is not the issue and is in control presently.
That sentence should have put a fucking padlock on the detour.
Instead, Nicole Newall’s witness statement said Cummins wanted a holistic report on all my conditions, “not just mental health as the GP had referred to in the letter”. That is not a faithful summary. The GP had expressly referred to IBS and said it was not the issue. Newall’s statement converted a letter that answered the bowel point into one that supposedly dealt only with mental health.
Later, Newall said Cummins had no medical information “from Occupational Health” confirming that IBS was stable. Notice the narrowing. Medical information existed from my GP, but it did not come from the provider serving Cummins, so the inconvenient sentence was placed outside the corporate frame.
My doctor was apparently medical enough to assess me, recommend a phased return and state that IBS was controlled. Yet when that advice threatened the referral narrative, Cummins needed its own medical professionals to run the plate again.
Call it holistic if you like. Meanwhile, the machine was still chewing the same evidence until it produced something useful.
Nineteen Questions, A Legal Team And A Corporate Shell Game
BHSF’s record is where the nice HR varnish starts coming off in strips.
It recorded a 19-question referral from the business, more than the standard appointment allowed. After the first missed appointment, the referral remained unchanged. The note then referred to information from HRDEP that the questions had been posed by the legal team. It said an Occupational Health physician could be more suitable, particularly in an Employment Tribunal scenario. Finally, the record stated the decisive point plainly: “the business opted for the OHP assessment”.
Now compare that with what Newall told me.
Her email said: “As you see this recommendation came from the OH team and not the Company”. Unfortunately, the material she relied upon said the business made the choice. Occupational Health may have recommended the physician after being handed an oversized legal-question buffet, but Cummins supplied the menu and selected the service.
Nicole Newall’s witness statement makes the position dirtier still. She recalled Occupational Health questioning the number of questions and whether every one required an answer. Her response was that Cummins was taking advice and needed them all answered “to support our case management”. She added that she did not mention the Tribunal claim.
Perhaps she personally avoided saying the magic word during that Teams call. The BHSF note nevertheless recorded legal-team questions and an Employment Tribunal scenario. Meanwhile, the business needed every answer for case management.
Whose case? Managed towards what?
The capability paperwork was already waiting down the corridor with its shoes on.
The Capability Review She Thought I Was Trying To Delay
Paragraph 62 of Newall’s statement abandons the soft-focus support language and shows the destination. She said it appeared I was keen not to attend Occupational Health, presumably to delay a rescheduled Capability Review meeting, and that I would find any reason to justify non-attendance.
There it is. This was not merely wellbeing or simply adjustments. A Capability Review sat behind the referral, and Newall assigned me a motive that made my objections part of the problem.
I had supplied reasons repeatedly. Two IBS reports already existed. My GP said the condition was controlled and was not the issue. The referral contained 19 questions, with more devoted to IBS than the mental-health absence. BHSF had recorded legal-team involvement. Cummins insisted on keeping the questions, blocked my return and left me unpaid.
Newall did not have to agree with those objections. However, recasting them as excuses designed to delay capability was a neat piece of corporate fucking alchemy. Evidence of mistrust became evidence that I could not be trusted. Resistance to an excessive referral became proof that the referral machinery should continue without me.
Her emails warned that Cummins might proceed with the absence-management process without an updated report. The statement supplied the name of the next station: Capability Review.
I cannot prove that Newall personally decided in advance that I would be dismissed. However, the process she administered pointed in that direction, used non-attendance as fuel and kept the capability route alive while I asked to return on my GP’s phased plan.
That is why the IBS questions mattered. They were not floating in a wellness brochure. Instead, those questions sat inside a process with consequences.
Then The HR Adviser Became The Injured Party
Newall’s statement eventually reaches the familiar corporate reversal. My emails had become “increasingly rude and confrontational”. She was doing her best. Although she understood that I had mental-health issues, she did not believe those issues justified how I spoke to her. She found it “really upsetting”.
Some of my emails were combative. I own them. By then I was mentally unwell, barred from earning, receiving no company sick pay, fighting a referral that wandered into a disability unrelated to the current absence, and watching my GP’s advice lose a corporate audition against a 19-question legal production.
Context does not make every sentence elegant. It does explain why the correspondence was not a fucking gratitude card.
Whether Newall’s distress was personal, legally polished or both, the passage performs an obvious function. The Senior HR Adviser controlling access to work and administering the capability process becomes the emotionally injured participant. Meanwhile, the disabled employee’s escalating distress becomes a tone problem.
This tactic is cheap because it works. Institutions provoke, restrict, delay and document. When the person under pressure reacts, the file turns around and photographs the reaction. Suddenly everyone is discussing how the professional felt while exercising power, not how that power was used.
Nicole Newall seemed pleasant at the hearing, angelic when compared to other witnesses like Gemma Penk. That memory stands. Its relevance does not.
A soft manner can deliver a hard refusal. Nice people can operate ugly systems. No amount of courtroom composure changes the 19 questions, the legal-team note, the business choosing the physician, the GP letter, the capability inference or the decision to keep me outside without pay.
She Was Not The Beginning, Either
Reverse chronology matters here. Abbott came after Newall, but Newall did not create the whole machine. Gemma Penk managed the process before her. DEP compiled the original referral around the handover. Nicola Teasdale and earlier management occupied the layers underneath. TCAP will get there.
Newall’s importance lies in what she did with the inheritance. Once she had the reports, she retained almost all the IBS questions. After the GP said IBS was not the issue, she insisted on the broader review. When Occupational Health questioned the volume, she said every answer was needed for case management. As capability approached, my objections became evidence of delay.
Even after our direct contact ended, her statement says she later supplied a note for my appeal against dismissal. Our relationship stopped. However, the file kept working.
That is the corporate succession TCAP is now excavating backwards. Each new handler arrives with a fresh signature and discovers the same old appetite for paperwork. Nobody owns the whole machine, yet everyone finds the button.
TCAP Verdict: Foul Player
Nicole Newall may be a perfectly pleasant person across a hearing room. She may have felt genuinely upset. Neither proposition acquits the documents.
Her conduct, as I assess it, helped turn a mental-health absence into an overfilled medical case file with seven IBS questions, legal-team fingerprints and a capability destination. Newall’s explanations shifted when the previous reports arrived. The GP’s direct statement that IBS was not the issue disappeared inside her later summary. Responsibility for the physician referral was pushed towards Occupational Health even though the record said the business opted for it. Finally, her witness statement used her own upset to repaint sustained objections as unjustified hostility.
No horns, cackle or sinister performance were required.
Just a polished HR professional, a disabled employee kept outside the gate, and a fucking file being prepared for whatever Cummins wanted to do next.
Her witness-box presentation gave me a nice surface.
The paperwork gave me Nicole Newall.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources retained by TCAP
- Nicole Newall – Witness Statement, Thompson v Cummins Ltd, case 2501831/2022 – TCAP-held litigation document
- Lee Thompson and Nicole Newall – contemporaneous email correspondence, 3 November to 2 December 2022 – TCAP-held correspondence
- BHSF Occupational Health – referral review record dated 24 November 2022 – TCAP-held litigation document
- Pease Way Medical Centre – GP letter dated 25 November 2022 – TCAP-held medical evidence
- Occupational Health reports dated February and March 2022 – TCAP-held medical evidence
Related Reads