Gordon Davis supplied Cummins with an admirably concise witness statement.
It contained eight paragraphs. Most concerned a manning sheet from which my name had been omitted while I was absent from work.
Then came paragraph 7:
“In fact I never met the Claimant.”
Seven words. Clear, categorical and completely unqualified.
Davis did not say that he could not remember me. He did not suggest that we might once have crossed paths. Nothing in the statement acknowledged uncertainty after more than two decades at a large manufacturing plant.
He said we had never met.
Unfortunately, the Cummins bundle contained a Record of Conversation documenting an occasion on which we had.
The Record Which Remembered For Him
The Record of Conversation at bundle page 345 is dated 26 July 2021. It concerns a safety incident on Hot Test and begins by confirming that a conversation took place that day.
My name appears throughout the document. My signature appears at the bottom alongside the management signatures.
During the hearing, I put the document to Davis and identified the team-leader signature as his. Faced with Cummins’ own record, he accepted that we must have met on at least that occasion.
The contradiction could hardly have been cleaner:
- His witness statement said we had never met.
- The company bundle documented a meeting.
- Davis accepted that the meeting must have happened.
- Therefore, paragraph 7 was factually wrong.
That did not automatically prove that Davis had deliberately lied. A lie requires knowledge and intention. People can make mistakes, and memories can fail.
However, none of that changes the first evidential fact. His categorical statement was false.
Cross-examination should have opened the question of why.
“Never Met” Does Not Mean “Cannot Remember”
Davis had several honest formulations available if his memory was uncertain:
- “I do not remember meeting the Claimant.”
- “I have no recollection of dealing with him.”
- “I may have encountered him, but I cannot remember doing so.”
- “I had no meaningful prior dealings with him.”
He used none of them.
Instead, Davis chose an absolute assertion and placed it inside a witness statement declaring that its contents were true.
The distinction matters. “I cannot remember” describes the witness’s present recollection. “I never met him” claims knowledge of an objective historical fact.
Davis supplied the second formulation.
Employment Judge Seamus Sweeney later rewrote it into the first.
Sweeney Supplied The Missing Excuse
Paragraph 76 of the written reasons records the contradiction.
The tribunal accepted Davis’s evidence as “genuine and honest”. Sweeney then declared that he “was not lying” and had simply failed to remember the occasion on which he accepted we must have met.
That explanation did not appear in Davis’s statement.
No careful reasoning explains why the tribunal rejected the possibility that he had knowingly made a convenient false assertion. Sweeney does not identify evidence demonstrating an innocent memory failure. Nor does the judgment explain how such a confident absolute survived whatever process Cummins and its lawyers used to prepare the statement.
The witness supplied the false assertion.
Sweeney supplied the alibi.
A court is entitled to decide that incorrect evidence resulted from a mistake rather than dishonesty. What it should not do is announce that conclusion as though judicial confidence can substitute for analysis.
Yet that is exactly what happened.
The Unsigned Statement Of Absolute Truth
The copy of Davis’s witness statement supplied to TCAP is unsigned and undated.
That does not prove that no signed version ever existed. Davis also attended the hearing and could have adopted the contents orally.
Nevertheless, it adds another layer to the evidential farce.
Cummins produced a two-page statement containing an absolute assertion contradicted by its own bundle. The version now available has blank signature and date fields. Once challenged, the witness retreated from “never met” to accepting that we must have met.
Sweeney still polished the wreckage until it became “genuine and honest”.
Apparently, truth at Newcastle Employment Tribunal was not determined by whether a statement was accurate. It depended upon which party supplied the inaccuracy.
The Overtime History Davis Also Forgot
The documented meeting was not my only reason for rejecting Davis’s supposed unfamiliarity.
During my first period of employment, I regularly completed substantial overtime. That included staying behind to work on shifts for which Davis was responsible.
The bundle records my contemporaneous account that I completed more than 300 overtime hours during my first year. Cummins’ own appraisal correspondence acknowledged that account while arguing about how those hours should affect my rating.
Those documents do not allocate every overtime hour to a named team leader. Therefore, TCAP does not present them as independent proof that Davis personally supervised every shift I remember.
They do, however, support the broader context. And we did, at that time, both work on Team 4.
I was not an invisible employee who briefly materialised for one Record of Conversation. I worked extensive additional hours across the plant during my first stint. My direct recollection is that many involved remaining behind for Davis’s shifts.
Sweeney nevertheless reduced the entire history to one supposedly forgettable occasion.
The documentary record established at least one meeting. My evidence described considerably more contact. Davis’s statement denied everything.
Only one version received automatic judicial charity.
A Manning Sheet Did Not Erase The False Statement
Davis had been called to explain a manning sheet dated October 2022. His name appears on the sheet as team leader, while mine was absent.
Cummins said I had been excluded because I was on long-term sick leave and was not expected to work during the relevant period. The tribunal accepted that explanation and rejected my belief that the omission formed part of a wider pattern intended to make me feel that I was already being removed from the business.
Sweeney was entitled to reject my interpretation of that sheet.
What he was not entitled to do was treat the conclusion about the manning sheet as a magic solvent capable of dissolving every credibility problem surrounding the witness.
Two separate questions existed:
- Was there an innocent operational explanation for leaving me off the rota?
- Did Davis give accurate evidence when he said that we had never met?
The tribunal answered the first question in Cummins’ favour and then behaved as though the second no longer mattered.
It mattered enormously.
A witness can offer a plausible explanation for one document while making a false statement about his previous dealings with the claimant. Finding the rota innocent did not make paragraph 7 true.
Sweeney simply bundled everything together, declared Davis – in the face of all evidence – honest and moved on.
Judicial Charity Flowed In One Direction
This case repeatedly demonstrates the same credibility arrangement.
When a Cummins witness gave incorrect evidence, Sweeney searched for an innocent explanation.
When Cummins recreated a missing letter, the tribunal minimised it because the figures inside were accurate.
If company notes changed, the alteration became a spelling correction or administrative tidying.
When a manager could not remember something damaging, memory failure was accepted.
Yet when I disputed a record, challenged an omission or expressed distrust, Sweeney treated my reaction as evidence of defective character. My concerns became hostility, paranoia, antipathy or refusal to accept responsibility.
Cummins witnesses received interpretation.
I received diagnosis.
Davis did not even need to explain the difference between “never met” and “cannot remember”. Sweeney climbed into the evidential hole and filled it for him.
That is not neutral fact-finding. It is credibility laundering.
What If I Had Made The Same Statement?
Imagine that my witness statement had said:
“In fact I never met Gordon Davis.”
Cummins then produces a signed Record of Conversation documenting a meeting between us. Under questioning, I accept that the meeting must have occurred.
Would Sweeney have serenely announced that I was “genuine and honest”?
Would he have inserted an innocent memory explanation absent from my statement?
And would the judgment have dismissed the contradiction in two sentences and criticised Cummins for attacking my credibility?
The question answers itself.
My incorrect absolute would have been added to the tribunal’s expanding portrait of me as dishonest, unreasonable and consumed by distrust. Sweeney would have cited it while explaining why some other piece of my evidence could not be accepted.
For Davis, the same contradiction became a harmless senior moment.
One evidential rule applied to Cummins. Another applied to the person suing it.
The Complaint Sweeney Already Knew About
By the time of the hearing, Sweeney had been informed that I had previously complained about him.
He addressed the issue at the start but, in my view, did not even describe my complaint correctly. Rather than identify the concern accurately and examine whether his continued involvement created an appearance problem, he reduced it to something easier to rebuke me for.
The court had therefore created the worst arrangement possible. It placed criticism of Sweeney’s conduct directly before him and then left him in control of the person who had made it.
A judge confident in his impartiality might have taken exceptional care to demonstrate even-handed reasoning. Sweeney’s written reasons display the opposite.
Company witnesses receive excuses that they did not supply themselves. My motives are repeatedly interpreted in the least charitable terms available. Obvious contradictions become insignificant whenever acknowledging them might support my wider concerns.
Official judicial guidance asks whether a fair-minded and informed observer would see a real possibility of bias. It does not require access to the judge’s private thoughts.
TCAP cannot prove what occurred inside Sweeney’s head. Perhaps my complaint did not influence him consciously at all.
The appearance remains rotten.
A Thin-Skinned Judgment
In my view, the complaint put Sweeney’s nose badly out of joint.
His judgment reads less like a detached assessment of competing evidence and more like a prolonged attempt to establish that the troublesome claimant was wrong about everything.
That determination required extraordinary feats of judicial generosity towards Cummins.
Paling recreated a disputed letter and apparently failed to tell Penk. Sweeney minimised it.
Davis said that we had never met before accepting that we had. Sweeney rewrote the false statement as forgetfulness.
Cummins produced disputed, edited and reconstructed records. My distrust of those records became the real evidential problem.
The pattern is difficult to miss. Any company failure could be explained, proportioned or forgiven. Every reaction from me could be moralised, magnified and used against me.
Sweeney appeared incapable of rising above the criticism I had made about him. Instead, he spent the judgment writing down to it.
Judicial robes cannot make thin skin look like reasoning.
“He Was Not Lying”
Sweeney’s declaration that Davis “was not lying” is particularly revealing.
The tribunal could reasonably have written:
Davis’s statement was incorrect, but we are not satisfied that the error was deliberate.
That would at least recognise the false evidence before expressing a conclusion about intention.
Instead, Sweeney immediately absolved him. The wording sounds less like a finding reached through analysis and more like a protective reflex.
Davis was not mistaken until proven otherwise. He was honest because Sweeney said so.
No comparable presumption protected me.
When my interpretation differed from Cummins’, the tribunal did not begin by announcing that I was honest but mistaken. It repeatedly used those disagreements to support an increasingly hostile character assessment.
Sweeney’s treatment of Davis therefore matters beyond one meeting.
It reveals who received the benefit of doubt and who was denied it before the evidence had finished speaking.
The Tribunal Repaired Cummins’ Evidence
A tribunal should assess the evidence supplied by witnesses. It should not quietly improve that evidence after a contradiction appears.
Davis said “never”.
The document said otherwise.
Rather than confront the categorical falsehood, Sweeney changed its effective meaning to “I cannot remember”.
That was a repair.
Once repaired, Davis could remain genuine and honest. Cummins could retain the benefit of his evidence. My challenge could then be repackaged as another example of unreasonable hostility towards an innocent company witness.
The reasoning moved in a perfect circle:
- Cummins’ witness was presumed honest.
- Therefore, his false statement must have been a memory lapse.
- Because it was a memory lapse, challenging his honesty was unreasonable.
- My unreasonable challenge then proved my general distrust.
- That distrust supposedly justified rejecting my wider case.
Sweeney did not merely brush over the hole.
He climbed inside it, installed lighting and handed Cummins the keys.
Literal Bullshit Would Probably Have Fared Better
By this stage, Cummins could apparently have shovelled literal bullshit into the witness box, labelled it “genuine and honest”, and Sweeney would have criticised me for noticing the smell.
That is obviously hyperbole.
Unfortunately, the evidential pattern making it funny is documented.
A witness statement contained an absolute assertion. Cummins’ own bundle contradicted it. The witness accepted that the documented encounter must have occurred.
Sweeney still ruled that the witness was not lying and supplied innocent forgetfulness as the explanation.
What more was I supposed to do?
The document existed. The contradiction was admitted. The wording could not have been clearer.
Still, the benefit went to Cummins.
Gordon Davis – The Witness Sweeney Rewrote
Gordon Davis said he had never met me.
The company bundle proved an encounter. My signature was on the Record of Conversation, and Davis accepted that we must have met.
My evidence also described regular overtime on shifts for which he was responsible. Bundle material supported the scale of my overtime, even though it did not identify every supervising manager.
None of that disturbed Sweeney.
The judge did not merely accept an explanation from Davis. He supplied the crucial explanation himself. “Never met” became “could not remember”, and a false absolute became genuine, honest evidence.
That transformation tells the real story.
Cummins did not have to present flawless witnesses. Its witnesses did not even have to remain consistent with the company’s own documents.
They only needed Sweeney to want an innocent explanation badly enough.
He did.
The judgment awarded me nothing, excused almost everything and repeatedly converted evidential holes into personal failings on my part.
In my view, that was not a judge rising above criticism.
It was a thin-skinned, very little man proving why the criticism existed.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Mr L Thompson v Cummins Ltd – Employment Tribunal Written Reasons, particularly paragraphs 13 and 76.
- Gordon Davis witness statement, particularly paragraph 7 – held by TCAP.
- Cummins Employment Tribunal Main Bundle, Record of Conversation dated 26 July 2021, page 345 – held by TCAP.
- Cummins Employment Tribunal Main Bundle, Week 44 manning sheet naming Gordon Davis as Team Leader, page 1611 – held by TCAP.
- Cummins Employment Tribunal Bundle Index dated 19 September 2023, item 75 – held by TCAP.
- Guide to Judicial Conduct, July 2023, particularly the sections concerning impartiality and perceived bias.
- Complaint correspondence concerning Employment Judge Sweeney – held by TCAP.