The Natalie Morton Cummins witness statement is only four pages long. It still manages to expose a central trick in the tribunal presentation.
Morton had apparently owned the investigation into my wage complaint. Later, Cummins presented a prepared explanation for a disputed wage deduction during the tribunal hearing. I can see the when a tactic is being deployed, it was like watching Shakespeare. I withdrew that narrow part of my claim. The company then suggested Morton need not give evidence. I knew of a history between myself and Morton as she had previously chaired a grievance hearing that I’d submitted, but given the scattergun nature Cummins for dismissal had commenced for terminating me, I was physically and mentally drained so, although aware that this was tactical, didn’t fully at that time realise the gravity.
That sequence matters. The tribunal read her statement on day one. By 29 July 2024, I had accepted the wage explanation, agreed under pressure and, being fair, my own relief that I did not need to question her and allowed an inconvenient witness to avoid the stand.
I saw the move. The timing did not fool me into believing that Cummins had suddenly discovered payroll arithmetic in the middle of the hearing. What I failed to appreciate, while mentally exhausted and trying to conduct a complex case without representation, was its full evidential significance.
Accepting the wage explanation did not make Morton irrelevant. It only removed one allegation involving her. I should have insisted that she still take the stand because the historic grievance she conducted was where the breakdown in trust began.
Historic Did Not Mean Irrelevant
The grievance was historic by the time of the tribunal. Its age did not make it irrelevant. This was where the breakdown in trust began, and Cummins later relied upon an allegedly irretrievable breakdown in the employment relationship as a reason for dismissing me.
I made the wage concession. The decision was mine. Looking back, I believe I accepted a framing that was far too convenient for Cummins. Morton’s statement was not merely about payroll. It contained direct admissions about the cooked grievance process, the disputed notes and the origin of the mistrust Cummins later portrayed as a defect in my personality.
My earlier article dealt with how Cummins selected Morton, stripped reasoning from the grievance outcome and allowed Nicola Teasdale to choose the person who would conduct the original investigation. This sequel examines what Morton later admitted in sworn evidence and how she avoided having any of it tested.
A Four-Page Alibi With One Fatal Admission
Morton says she had worked for Cummins since 2007. At the relevant time, she was Regional Payroll Manager for Europe. Her role involved accurate payroll delivery, auditing, internal controls and monitoring compliance.
Cummins nevertheless selected this payroll manager to investigate my complaint about shop-floor management, including the Neil McCaughtrie drug-testing incident.
According to paragraph 10 of Morton’s statement, she led the investigation, coordinated its stages, consulted leadership, updated participants and was responsible for the findings and their delivery. That is a substantial claim of ownership.
Then come paragraphs 9 and 13.
Morton says she did not prepare the notes of my 11 June 2021 interview. A note taker did (Elizabeth Rolls).More importantly, she admits that she did not check those notes with me because she did not realise this was standard procedure at the Darlington engine plant.
There it is.
The woman responsible for the findings did not verify that record with me before delivering her conclusions. She delivered the verdict, but accuracy apparently belonged to somebody else.
At Cummins, accountability is very mobile. It only arrives when somebody in authority needs lower ranked employees dealing with. The facts? Not important.
The Investigator Who Did Not Check The Record
The distinction between writing notes and owning an investigation is not complicated. An investigator may use a note taker. That does not relieve the investigator of responsibility for ensuring the record is reliable, especially when the interviewee immediately disputes it.
These notes were not a harmless aide-memoire. They became the official account of what I had said. Cummins used the resulting investigation to reject my grievance, while the later tribunal bundle preserved the same document as part of the company’s evidential narrative. I was perplexed as to how it was so clear cut that it hasn’t been upheld. I asked for the meeting minutes. Ignored. I asked again and finally they arrived.
It presented detailed answers in the first person, including the sentence: “I started shaking with anger”. Most people that know me would laugh at such prospect. It was, to be frank, laced with bullshit in order to not uphold the grievance. I’d dared to complain about a more senior employee.
I challenged that wording on the day the notes. The document attributed words to me which I had not used. Fifteen minutes later, I pointed out that the notes appeared to omit my detailed concerns about Cummins failing to follow the drug and alcohol process.
The email trail could hardly be clearer. My objections were not invented years later for litigation. They were immediate, specific and sent directly to Morton.
Morton responded the next morning that she had completed the investigation, delivered the feedback and left me with an appeal.
No examination of the disputed sentence followed. Nobody explained the omissions. Morton did not offer to compare recollections, speak to the note taker or issue a corrected record.
She simply closed the hatch and pointed towards an appeal process whose HR officer had selected her in the first place.
Fair And Thorough, Minus The Reasoning
Morton’s outcome letter described the exercise as a fair investigation based on the facts. The actual analysis occupied almost no space.
Morton said another grievance had already considered my concerns about appraisal scoring, so she upheld that earlier decision. She also said management had requested the for-cause drug and alcohol test in good faith. That was essentially it. Sure, Natalie, I was drinking and partying 3-4 hours into an afternoon shift. I didn’t know what for-cause was, but I’m sure this wasn’t it. I had just has a disagreement with a team leader though so the more accurate description was that it was an attempt at a humiliation ritual.
The letter did not explain how the decision was arrived at. How could it? They didn’t want it inflaming, they wanted it sweeping under the carpet. It ignored the procedural concerns recorded in the company’s own notes. Those concerns included whether HR authorisation existed, whether the correct people conducted the process, why I had worked hours without anybody identifying intoxication and why Cummins allowed me to drive away if it genuinely considered me impaired.
“Good faith” was not a reasoned answer to those questions. It was a management blessing printed on company letterhead.
I asked Morton immediately how she had reached her decision because reasoning was essential to any meaningful appeal. Her reply repeated the conclusion. When I pointed out that the outcome had failed to address the record of conversation, the answer remained the same: appeal it.
Thus, a supposedly thorough investigation produced a one-page outcome, an unverified interview record and no serious response when the interviewee challenged its accuracy.
That is not a safeguard. It is an administrative trapdoor.
The Appeal Officer Chose The Original Investigator
At the later appeal hearing, Nicola Teasdale explained that Morton came from another part of the business and that she had chosen her to conduct the grievance. Cummins may present that as sensible separation from shop-floor management.
The difficulty is obvious. Any appeal against Morton’s decision went to Teasdale, the same HR leader who had selected her.
Therefore, Teasdale selected the investigator and then operated the stage which reviewed that investigator’s work. Even if Cummins could point to no express rule prohibiting the arrangement, it damaged the appearance of genuine independence.
Morton’s statement does not confront that governance problem. Instead, it offers the bland chronology of an investigator who arrived, conducted interviews and delivered findings.
Restore the missing ingredient and the chronology becomes less impressive: Morton did not verify the central record with the employee, supplied almost no reasoning and refused to revisit specific disputes after I raised them.
The Payroll Shield
Most of Morton’s witness statement concerns the allegation that she later caused or arranged an error in my wages after I complained about her notes.
She denies it. Morton says she had no role in day-to-day payroll at Darlington, could not edit the time-management or payroll systems and only had viewing access. She invokes Sarbanes-Oxley controls as the corporate perimeter fence which supposedly made interference impossible.
I need to be exact here. I did not prove that Morton personally altered my pay. During the tribunal hearing, I withdrew the August 2022 wage limb after Gemma Penk gave evidence about the payroll calculations. I was hasty, throwing numbers whilst on the sitness stand wasn’t exactly orthadox. That withdrawal matters, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Equally, Cummins did accept that my wages were wrong. The argument concerned why they were wrong, what the later deductions represented and whether the sequence supported the retaliatory inference I had drawn at the time.
Morton’s payroll defence answered the narrow allegation against her. It did not answer the grievance questions. Nor did it explain why a senior manager whose stated job involved accurate delivery, auditing and compliance appeared so detached from repeated wage failures until they escalated into formal complaints. But those weren’t tribunal issues at the time.
The statement even says that January 2023 emails concerned my sick pay for November and December 2023. Cummins dismissed me in February 2023. Presumably the company’s devotion to accurate and timely payroll had become so advanced that it was now auditing the future.
It is probably a drafting error. Leaving it in a four-page statement built around payroll accuracy was also wonderfully stupid.
The Explanation Was Prepared, Then Staged Mid-Trial
The written reasons record the courtroom sequence in paragraph 10. On Monday 29 July 2024, I withdrew the part of my unlawful deduction claim concerning August and September 2022 after Penk’s evidence. I then said I did not need to ask Morton questions, and Cummins did not call her. In hindsight, this cleared a route to SOSR track without opportunity to show causation (it wasn’t my “suspicious mind”)
Paragraph 13 adds that the tribunal had read Morton’s statement on day one. However, after I withdrew the wage complaint, Cummins did not seek to rely upon that statement in the end.
The payroll explanation was not invented spontaneously in the hearing. Penk’s written statement had already set it out. That is precisely why I describe what followed as staged rather than improvised.
Cummins arrived with the explanation prepared. Penk presented it at the point when accepting it would resolve the narrow wage limb. After Cummins obtained that concession, it could portray Morton’s attendance as unnecessary.
Penk’s evidence supplied Cummins’ payroll explanation. Once I accepted it for the purpose of the statutory wage claim, the discussion moved naturally towards whether Morton still needed to attend. I agreed that she did not.
Two Results From One Explanation
Cummins got two results from one explanation. The wage allegation involving Morton disappeared, then Morton disappeared with it.
I cannot prove what Cummins discussed privately with its legal team. Nor can I prove that they designed the sequence in advance solely to keep Morton from the witness box. What I can show is the structure, the timing and the result.
Cummins framed Morton’s evidence primarily as an answer to the wage allegation. Penk’s evidence helped resolve that allegation. The company then avoided calling Morton, even though her own statement contained admissions going well beyond payroll.
That is why I regard the presentation as contrived and tactical. It worked like a two-for-one corporate voucher: dispose of the narrow wage limb and remove the witness carrying the grievance problem.
The Move Was Seen But Its Full Significance Missed At That Time
I was not oblivious. I saw Cummins narrowing Morton’s relevance to the wage issue and recognised that the explanation created a route to keeping her off the stand.
What I did not grasp in that exhausted moment was the full significance of allowing Cummins to tie the two issues together. I had spent days trying to conduct a legally and factually sprawling case as a litigant in person. The bundles ran to thousands of pages. Nine Cummins witnesses gave evidence, the tribunal read two more statements, multiple causes of action overlapped and I was already dealing with a mental-health condition which made sustained exposure to the material overwhelming. Oh and of course, three separate mechanisms for dismissal to contend with.
Mental fatigue had set in. Blindness had not.
There is an important distinction. I recognised the move at the level of courtroom tactics. Fatigue prevented me from following the consequence through to the wider causation case and insisting that Morton remained necessary even after I withdrew the wage limb.
My concession was narrow: I accepted Cummins’ explanation for the August and September 2022 wage calculations and withdrew that part of the unlawful deduction claim. It was not an acceptance that Morton’s grievance investigation had been fair. It did not concede that the disputed notes were reliable. Neither did it erase her admitted failure to check the record with me.
Most importantly, I did not concede that the history of that grievance was irrelevant to the breakdown in trust.
A rested and represented claimant should have said: the wage issue may now be gone, but Morton must still answer questions about the grievance because Cummins relies upon relationship breakdown as a reason for dismissal.
I saw the first half of the play. Mental fatigue stopped me from closing down the second.
Capability, Gross Misconduct Or Breakdown
Cummins did not originally present one clean and consistent reason for ending my employment.
The dismissal letter cited gross misconduct, irretrievable breakdown in the employment relationship and/or capability. Those were three different routes joined together by the wonderfully useful words “and/or”.
Capability concerned my health, absence and ability to return. Gross misconduct treated alleged non-engagement and communication as culpable conduct deserving summary dismissal. Relationship breakdown offered a wider basket into which Cummins could throw absence management, Occupational Health disputes, emails, tweets, grievances and my stated loss of trust.
One route could fail while another remained available. Where no individual allegation justified dismissal, Cummins could aggregate the entire history and call the result irretrievable.
By the tribunal hearing, the company’s defence had settled upon some other substantial reason, or SOSR, based on relationship breakdown. The judgment recorded Cummins’ case as an irretrievable breakdown caused by my alleged failure to cooperate, my communications and the collapse of trust. It ultimately accepted breakdown as the principal reason. Nice, given Morton/Teasdale were causation. Hence the tactic. Me submitting to the theatre handed it on a plate. Tactics you’d expect were premeditated in hindsight and when paying Wendy Miller KC a small fortune. Ethical? You decide.
The tribunal also recorded that Steve Morley considered my conduct to amount to gross misconduct. Meanwhile, it said my absence was contextual because much of the breakdown arose while Cummins was managing that absence, but declared that absence was not itself the principal reason.
That is not a simple dismissal reason. It is a stack of overlapping explanations from which breakdown eventually emerged as the winning formulation.
Once Cummins and the tribunal settled upon breakdown, the cause of that breakdown became impossible to treat as trivia.
A Historic Grievance Was Still Causally Central
Withdrawing a statutory wage claim did not make the 2021 grievance history disappear. The grievance was no longer a separate live complaint requiring its own remedy. However, it remained central background evidence because it was where the later breakdown in trust began.
Cummins relied upon irretrievable relationship breakdown as its eventual principal reason for dismissing me. Once the company placed that breakdown at the centre of its defence, causation mattered. The tribunal did not merely need to decide whether trust had eventually collapsed. It also needed to understand how the collapse developed, what caused it and whether Cummins had contributed to the condition it later used against me.
The written reasons make the causal gap particularly obvious. Paragraph 214 says my loss of trust arose from my perception that Cummins was bent on terminating my employment unfairly. Fine. Where did that perception come from? Was it simply invented inside what the judgment later called my “suspicious mind”, or had Cummins’ earlier conduct supplied objective reasons for it?
Nobody could answer that question honestly by beginning the story with my later confrontational emails. A breakdown has a history. Trust deteriorates through events, responses and accumulated experience.
My wider case concerned that causal history, my deteriorating trust, the treatment of later complaints, the resulting mental-health harm and Cummins’ repeated claim that my reactions arose from a defective personality rather than what the company had done.
Morton Sat Near The Beginning
Morton sat near the beginning of that chain.
Her investigation followed the drug-testing incident. I disputed the minutes immediately. Her outcome supplied conclusions without reasons. When I challenged the accuracy of the official record, she refused to engage and redirected me into an appeal selected and managed within the same HR structure.
Those events mattered because Cummins later portrayed my suspicion as irrational and the breakdown as something I had created. Cross-examining Morton would have tested whether my mistrust had an objective foundation, whether the company had mishandled an early grievance and whether Cummins helped cause the breakdown upon which it eventually relied.
The obvious questions remained:
- Why did she deliver findings without checking the accuracy of my interview record?
- What evidence caused her to conclude that management acted in good faith?
- Which of my procedural concerns did she actually investigate?
- Why did the outcome fail to address the record of conversation?
- What did she do after I identified disputed wording and omitted evidence?
- Why was an appeal officer involved in selecting the original investigator?
- Did she accept that an unverified record could itself damage trust and mental health?
- Did her handling of the grievance contribute to the later relationship breakdown?
None of those questions depended upon proving that Morton personally touched a payroll system.
The wage claim was one door. Behind it sat an entire room of grievance evidence. Once the door closed, Cummins behaved as though the room had vanished.
A Statement Read, Then Quietly Neutralised
There is another awkward feature in the written reasons. The tribunal read Morton’s statement on day one. Later, the company did not rely on it because she was not called.
That may be procedurally orthodox once the parties agreed she was unnecessary. Yet it left an odd evidential shadow. The tribunal knew her account, Cummins obtained the benefit of removing the wage allegation, and I lost the opportunity to test the admissions embedded in the document.
The company’s clean version became simple. Morton did not cause the pay error. I withdrew the wage limb. Therefore, no need for Morton.
My actual case was messier. I had alleged that a grievance process produced an unreliable record, that Cummins ignored my immediate objections and that this began a longer collapse of trust. Morton’s statement directly addressed those events and admitted a failure to follow the plant’s normal checking procedure.
Fatigue Was Not Agreement
The historic grievance therefore remained relevant to causation even after the wage claim disappeared. If Cummins wanted to rely upon relationship breakdown, it could not honestly begin the story at the point when my emails became angry and erase the earlier process which helped produce that anger.
A represented lawyer might have separated those issues and insisted that the grievance evidence remained relevant. I saw that Cummins was making a move, but I did not appreciate its full reach or insist upon that separation. Cummins benefited from my fatigue and the resulting mistake.
There is no shame in saying so. The whole point of professional litigation strategy is to make the opponent’s concessions work as hard as possible. Cummins’ representatives did their job. The tribunal permitted the sequence. I was the mentally exhausted non-lawyer who recognised the manoeuvre but failed to stop a witness disappearing behind a wage calculation.
The fact that the manoeuvre was procedurally available does not make it intellectually honest to pretend Morton had nothing left to answer.
Natalie Morton Cummins Accountability
I did not prove that Morton manipulated my wages. I withdrew that allegation after Penk’s frankly confusing evidence, and readers deserve to know it.
The grievance record remains another matter entirely.
Morton claimed responsibility for leading the investigation and delivering its findings. She also admitted that she did not prepare the disputed notes or verify them with me. Her one-page outcome declared management acted in good faith without explaining why, while her email response to immediate challenges was effectively that the process had ended and I should appeal.
Years later, Cummins produced her four-page statement. It wrapped the payroll allegation in internal controls, tucked the grievance admission into the middle and positioned her as a witness whose relevance could disappear with one part of the wage claim. Penk then presented a prepared wages explanation, I withdrew the narrow pay limb and Cummins kept Morton off the stand.
I saw what was happening. What fatigue and the scattergun dismissal prevented me from doing was insisting that Morton remained relevant to the historical causation of the relationship breakdown Cummins later used to justify dismissal.
The sequence worked perfectly for Cummins. Morton never faced cross-examination.
That absence is not exoneration. It is the absence of a test.
Cummins can call the matter resolved if it wants. The Natalie Morton Cummins record shows a grievance investigator who owned the verdict, disowned responsibility for the record and never entered the witness box to reconcile the two.
Fucking convenient.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- TCAP: Natalie Morton, The Cooked Grievance Process and Nicola Teasdale’s Freudian Slip
- Natalie Morton witness statement, particularly paragraphs 5 to 22, held by TCAP.
- Natalie Morton and Lee Thompson grievance email chain, 24 June to 2 July 2021, held by TCAP.
- Cummins grievance outcome letter dated 30 June 2021, held by TCAP.
- Investigatory interview notes dated 11 June 2021, held by TCAP.
- Gemma Penk witness statement, particularly paragraphs 196 to 200, held by TCAP.
- Lee Thompson witness statement, particularly paragraphs 14, 28 to 30 and 34, held by TCAP.
- Employment Tribunal written reasons in Thompson v Cummins Limited, case 2501831/2022, particularly paragraphs 2, 10, 13, 25, 81 to 82, 158 to 159 and 210 to 215, held by TCAP.