First, A Correction: TCAP Gave Wendy Miller Silk She Does Not Have
Before examining the story of Wendy Miller and Peak Ong, TCAP needs to correct its own record.
Previous articles repeatedly described the barrister as Wendy Miller KC.
That was wrong.
The Bar Standards Board register records Wendy Anne May Miller as a practising barrister called in July 2001. Meanwhile, her profiles at St Philips Chambers and 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square identify her simply as Wendy Miller.
Neither chambers presents her as King’s Counsel. Neither profile lists an appointment as KC. TCAP has also found no official appointment record showing that Miller ever received silk.
Therefore, Wendy Miller is a barrister.
She is not a KC.
The error belongs to TCAP. There is no evidence that Miller personally claimed the title, encouraged its use or had anything to do with our mistake.
Somewhere along the research road, TCAP appears to have picked up the wrong professional suffix and repeated it without returning to the original records. Once the error entered several articles, category pages and search results, it began citing itself.
A small homemade hall of mirrors.
Over the coming days and weeks, I will work through the affected articles and correct the titles, body text, categories, tags and associated metadata. Where changing an old URL would break existing links, a published correction will make the position clear.
However, the mistake concerns Miller’s professional title. It does not alter the judgments, Tribunal findings, recorded submissions, case histories or chambers marketing examined in those articles.
TCAP gave Wendy Miller silk she had not received.
TCAP now takes it back.
Fortunately, today’s story requires no borrowed grandeur.
This is the tale of Wendy Miller, barrister.
Not KC.
That particular promotion came from TCAP, not the Crown.
Now, back to the elderly cleaner.
Wendy Miller And Peak Ong Enter The Trophy Cabinet
Wendy Miller has found another vulnerable opponent to place in the professional trophy cabinet.
This time, the person standing across from her institutional client was not a multinational corporation, police force or executive with a silk-lined grievance.
It was Peak Ong, a 69-year-old Malaysian Chinese cleaner who worked 15 hours each week at Aberystwyth University.
Ong represented herself. Moreover, English was not her first language. She lived alone, carried a mortgage, supported relatives in Malaysia and could not afford to retire.
By the remedy hearing, she was 72 and piecing together temporary work in cleaning, cafés, childcare, dog walking and a fish-and-chip shop.
Perfect conditions, apparently, for a public institution to arrive with counsel, an enormous hearing bundle and a fresh vocabulary for winning.
Wendy Miller’s current 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square profile lists O v AU among her notable employment cases.
The profile says her “adept handling” resulted in the dismissal of most of more than 60 claims, leaving only “two discrete issues” and “significantly reducing any damages awarded.”
Those two little administrative crumbs were unfair dismissal and victimisation.
The final gross award was £264,442.09.
Presumably the unreduced figure included Aberystwyth University buying Peak Ong a new fucking university.
Count Every Claim, Shrink Every Finding
The profile’s framing is a lovely piece of legal accountancy.
First, count every allegation separately until the total climbs above 60. Once the Tribunal finds serious wrongdoing, compress the successful findings into “two discrete issues.”
One issue was merely the university dismissing Ong through a process the Tribunal found substantively and procedurally unfair.
Meanwhile, the other involved an “irresponsible and retaliatory” reference that destroyed her conditional offer of full-time employment.
Nothing to trouble the brass band, apparently.
Therefore: two discrete issues, six figures and one elderly cleaner’s remaining working life dropped into the university shredder.
That is the miracle of professional marketing.
Large numbers belong to the defence when they describe allegations defeated. However, the award becomes a vague quantity that counsel supposedly “significantly” reduced.
Reduced from what?
The profile does not say.
Which calculation establishes Miller’s personal reduction?
None appears.
What would the Tribunal have awarded if more claims had succeeded?
Nobody knows.
Consequently, “significantly reducing” floats above the case without a baseline, comparator or worked sum.
It is not arithmetic.
It is chambers mist sprayed across a £264,442 order.
The Elderly Cleaner At The Other End Of The CV
Peak Ong started working for Aberystwyth University in November 2014. Her cleaning shift ran from 6am until 9am, Monday to Friday.
She had also studied at the university and held two postgraduate degrees. Nevertheless, the employment at the centre of the litigation involved cleaning campus buildings for 15 hours each week.
By the time Aberystwyth dismissed her in May 2022, Ong was 69. Furthermore, she had a continuing shoulder injury, a history of depression and seven years of service.
The university, by contrast, possessed HR personnel, managers, policies, institutional machinery and legal representation.
At the final hearing, Ong appeared in person with intermittent assistance from her friend, Mr Dorman. The Tribunal service could not provide the interpreter she had requested, although the panel found that she followed the proceedings and suffered no resulting disadvantage.
The judgment also records that Miller kept her questions at a level Ong could understand.
That point deserves acknowledgement.
However, it does not transform the remaining record into a humanitarian expedition.
The hearing bundle eventually reached 1,989 pages. Ong repeatedly struggled to navigate the paperwork and needed help from the Tribunal. Miller, meanwhile, had represented the university at preliminary hearings and continued through the final and remedy stages.
This was not a pair of evenly armed litigants testing an academic point.
Instead, a public university arrived with counsel to defend its treatment of an elderly cleaner who had to construct her own case around cleaning shifts, medical treatment, workplace disputes and the temporary jobs she found after dismissal.
Miller’s profile calls the outcome adept handling.
Of course it fucking does.
Aberystwyth’s Disciplinary Machinery Collapsed
The university dismissed Ong after alleging a breakdown in working relationships. However, the Tribunal found that the process used to reach that result failed at several load-bearing points.
Aberystwyth relied on an alleged breach of a private mediation agreement, even though the university was not a party to it. The agreement did not say that breaching it could trigger disciplinary action, while the university’s own mediation material described the process as confidential.
Additionally, the suspension letter failed to provide specific details of the alleged conduct.
During the investigation, the investigator accepted a manager’s account without independently checking competing versions with several named witnesses. Ong did not receive the list of incidents in advance and effectively had to disprove allegations that management had already decided to treat as established.
The university also failed to disclose evidence supposedly supporting those allegations.
Nevertheless, its investigation report referred to “substantial evidence.” When questioned, the author could not identify the documents supporting that conclusion.
Next came a disciplinary hearing in which the university still had not properly particularised the allegations. Aberystwyth did not record the hearing.
Finally, the institution failed to hold an appeal hearing despite receiving a clear appeal letter.
The Tribunal called that omission fundamental.
On substance, the university did no better. Its witness could not identify which alleged acts had been proved or explain the basis for concluding that the working relationship had irretrievably broken down.
Consequently, the Tribunal found no reasonable basis for the dismissal.
One of those “two discrete issues” had now occupied most of the fucking workshop.
Then Came The Retaliatory Reference
After losing her university job, Ong secured a conditional offer to work as a night care assistant for Ceredigion County Council.
The role mattered enormously. It was full-time, would have approximately doubled her earnings and offered financial security during the final years of her working life.
Then the council asked Aberystwyth University for a reference.
In response, the university repeatedly wrote that Ong remained “in dispute” with it. Those words appeared against questions about honesty, integrity, working relationships, disciplinary history and her reason for leaving.
The Tribunal found the wording irrelevant to those questions and likely to damage Ong’s employment prospects.
It did exactly that.
After receiving the reference, the council withdrew its offer.
The Tribunal found that Aberystwyth supplied the wording because Ong had performed protected acts, including bringing Tribunal proceedings. Its conduct was described as “irresponsible and retaliatory.”
TCAP does not need to season that finding.
The Tribunal had already put the knife in.
Aberystwyth did not merely dismiss an elderly cleaner unfairly. Worse, when she found another route into secure employment, the university sent its dispute ahead of her and watched the door close.
Wendy Miller did not write the reference. Nor did she conduct the defective disciplinary process. Her role was to defend the institution after those events.
However, her professional profile now converts that defence into “adept handling” and relegates the unlawful outcome to two discrete issues.
That framing contains the moral vacancy.
The university retaliated.
Consequently, the cleaner lost the job.
Meanwhile, the barrister’s profile kept the scorecard.
Blame The Elderly Woman For Not Finding Enough Work
The remedy hearing revealed what “adept handling” looked like after liability.
Ong explained that she had struggled to find stable employment. She was now 72, competing with younger applicants in a small labour market and carrying the damage caused by an unusable reference.
Nevertheless, she kept trying.
Her work after dismissal included cleaning caravans, covering a temporary care-home cleaning role, working in a coffee shop, minding children, cleaning houses, walking dogs and taking shifts at a fish-and-chip shop.
She also registered with agencies, approached a former employer and considered engineering work outside Aberystwyth.
The Tribunal heard that she lived alone, had no family support in Britain, maintained an old house with a mortgage and sent financial assistance to relatives in Malaysia.
Despite that evidence, Miller submitted that Ong had failed to mitigate her losses.
Aberystwyth produced no evidence of suitable vacancies that Ong should have pursued.
Not one.
Miller’s cross-examination focused on the temporary jobs Ong had managed to obtain and the money she earned from them. Yet the university supplied nothing that undermined her account of the difficulties she faced.
The Tribunal said it had “considerable sympathy” for Ong’s predicament. It accepted that her age, language, location, financial circumstances and damaged reference left her with extremely limited prospects.
In short, the elderly cleaner scrubbed caravans, covered shifts, served coffee, minded children, walked dogs and kept applying.
The represented university arrived without a single suitable vacancy and argued that she had not tried hard enough.
That is not moral fortitude.
It is an invoice wearing court dress.
A “Modest” Award For Feeling Bereft And Worthless
Miller also argued that compensation for injury to feelings should remain within a “modest lower-band award.”
The Tribunal rejected that submission too.
Ong had secured a job offering purpose, human contact and financial stability. Aberystwyth’s retaliatory reference then helped take it away.
According to the judgment, the effect was devastating. Ong felt bereft, worthless, humiliated and financially insecure. Her distress, anxiety, sleeplessness and depression worsened.
Moreover, those consequences continued because she could not secure stable replacement work.
The Tribunal placed the injury in the middle Vento band and awarded £12,000, plus £3,011.35 in interest.
“Modest” had wandered into the wrong kitchen.
There is something impressively bleak about asking a Tribunal to discount an elderly woman’s distress after your institutional client helped destroy a job that would have transformed her income.
Yes, counsel must advance a client’s case.
No, the public does not have to admire the appetite.
Moreover, professional duty does not explain why the episode now appears on a barrister’s profile as an advertisement for distinction.
Wendy Miller And Peak Ong’s £264,442 “Reduction”
The final gross award comprised:
- £3,202.70 for unfair dismissal.
- £12,000 for injury to feelings.
- £3,011.35 interest on that sum.
- £141,348.33 for future loss of earnings.
- £13,177.77 for pension loss.
- £91,701.94 to account for income tax on the award.
The tax gross-up was not a bonus or lottery prize. It existed so taxation would not reduce the compensation below the amount the Tribunal intended Ong to receive.
Even so, the total order against Aberystwyth reached £264,442.09 gross.
Most of the economic damage flowed from the victimising reference. The Tribunal found a direct connection between that unlawful act and Ong’s continuing losses.
Without the reference, she would have started work for the council.
Instead, she lost what the panel regarded as her opportunity to remain economically active for the rest of her intended working life.
The Tribunal accepted that Ong planned to continue working until age 75. It rejected Miller’s attempt to cap her losses in September 2022 or April 2024.
Likewise, the panel refused a contributory-fault reduction and found no prospect that Ong would have been dismissed fairly in any event.
No Polkey reduction.
The contributory-fault argument failed.
Similarly, the mitigation attack produced no reduction.
Nor did Miller secure the “modest lower-band” injury award she requested.
Yet the profile still tells prospective clients that Miller significantly reduced the damages.
Perhaps the reduction occurred in a parallel hearing accessible only through the clerks’ room.
In the published one, £264,442.09 remained attached to the order.
Aberystwyth Returned For A Second Bite
The university was not finished.
In October 2025, Aberystwyth asked the Tribunal to reconsider the victimisation finding. It relied on an email showing that Ong had told the council about her dismissal and Tribunal proceedings before the university’s reference arrived.
The theory was obvious.
Perhaps, the institution suggested, Ong had destroyed her own job offer.
Unfortunately, the chronology refused to cooperate.
The council knew about Ong’s disclosure and continued with its recruitment process. It then requested the reference.
Only after Aberystwyth supplied that reference did the council withdraw the offer.
Furthermore, the university produced no evidence showing that the council acted because Ong had disclosed her dismissal or Tribunal claim. Aberystwyth could have investigated the reason and called evidence during the original hearing.
It did not.
The Tribunal rejected the reconsideration application as an attempt to relitigate causation under the disguise of new evidence.
The locked door remained locked.
For Aberystwyth.
Then Miller Asked The Cleaner To Contribute To The Legal Bill
Now we reach the part that should sit beside “adept handling” in letters large enough to read from Gray’s Inn.
The first remedy hearing was adjourned after Ong had not provided full mitigation disclosure. She later supplied a further 74 pages.
At the end of the reconvened hearing, Miller made a costs application on behalf of Aberystwyth University.
The institution presented a schedule totalling £15,779.77 and asked Ong to contribute towards it.
Consider the dining arrangement.
Aberystwyth had unfairly dismissed a 69-year-old cleaner.
Next, it victimised her with a retaliatory reference.
That reference cost Ong a full-time council job.
The institution then lost on liability, failed to cut her compensation as requested and faced a gross award exceeding £264,000.
After all that, its counsel asked the Tribunal to send part of the legal bill across the table to the elderly litigant in person.
The Tribunal refused.
Its reasons deserve to be stapled to the professional profile.
Ong had prepared the disclosure herself while suffering from stress and anxiety. English was not her first language. She lacked legal representation and struggled to organise a vast quantity of material.
Crucially, Ong had not requested the adjournment.
The Tribunal raised it to ensure a fair assessment of compensation. Aberystwyth did not seek the adjournment either and reluctantly agreed after Miller took instructions.
The panel held that the threshold for awarding costs had not been met. Moreover, even if Ong’s conduct had been unreasonable, it would not have exercised its discretion to make an order.
The judgment also restated a basic legal principle: Tribunals must not judge litigants in person by the standards applied to professional representatives.
A university represented by an employment specialist needed the Tribunal to explain that after attempting to turn an elderly cleaner’s paperwork difficulties into another invoice.
Morally, the well was already dry.
Apparently, somebody still lowered a bucket.
“Disputes Involving Vulnerable Parties”
Miller’s 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square profile describes her as experienced in disputes involving vulnerable parties, particularly people with mental-health issues.
Peak Ong certainly supplied the vulnerability.
She was elderly, disabled, depressed, financially insecure, unrepresented and speaking in her second language.
The university supplied the institutional machinery and most of a 1,989-page bundle.
Miller supplied the cross-examination, mitigation attack, “modest” award submission and application for a contribution towards costs.
That may demonstrate experience.
The word “care” would be doing rather more work.
Elsewhere, the profile praises Miller’s ability to cross-examine vulnerable witnesses. Again, Ong appears to fit the brochure.
Apparently, vulnerability is not a reason to temper the machinery.
It is a practice area.
Barristers Represent Clients; Profiles Choose Trophies
The predictable defence will say that barristers must represent their clients and advance lawful arguments.
Correct.
Miller did not owe Peak Ong the duties that she owed Aberystwyth University. Acting for an unpopular or unsuccessful client does not, by itself, prove misconduct.
However, that is not the criticism.
The public judgments show which arguments Miller advanced. Meanwhile, her current professional profile chooses to celebrate the case as evidence of “adept handling.”
Profiles are selective.
Nobody forced 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square to count the defeated allegations while compressing the successful claims into “two discrete issues.”
Likewise, nobody required the profile to claim that damages were significantly reduced without providing a starting figure, comparison or calculation.
Professional duty did not demand that the case enter the trophy cabinet at all.
Once counsel’s work becomes marketing, however, the public may inspect whatever the advertisement leaves outside the crop.
Outside this one sits an elderly cleaner.
Aberystwyth dismissed her unfairly.
The university then victimised her.
Its retaliatory reference destroyed what the Tribunal regarded as her remaining opportunity to secure stable, full-time employment.
Afterwards, the institution argued that Ong had not tried hard enough to find work, that her distress deserved a modest award, that her losses should be capped, that she had contributed to the damage and that she should help pay its legal costs.
Miller carried those arguments.
Her profile carried the victory.
Ong carried everything else.]
Two Discrete Issues And One Fucking Monument
Wendy Miller’s profile wants readers to admire the number of claims that disappeared.
TCAP prefers the findings that remained.
Substantively unfair dismissal.
Procedurally unfair dismissal.
Irresponsible and retaliatory victimisation.
A lost council job.
Years of lost earnings.
Continuing injury to feelings.
A failed reconsideration application.
Then came a refused costs application.
Finally, the order reached £264,442.09 gross.
If that represents a significantly reduced award, perhaps the original claim included compensation for the moon.
More likely, the wording exists to make a brutal result presentable to future institutional clients.
The university lost the findings that mattered most. Meanwhile, the elderly cleaner survived the paper mountain, cross-examination, second bite and costs threat.
Then a barrister’s profile walked past the wreckage, counted the claims that failed and called the journey adept.
That is not a victory lap.
It is a hearse doing doughnuts.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Bar Standards Board – Wendy Anne May Miller
- Employment Tribunal – Peak Ong v Aberystwyth University, liability judgment
- Employment Tribunal – Peak Ong v Aberystwyth University, reconsideration judgment
- 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square – Wendy Miller
- Employment Tribunal – Peak Ong v Aberystwyth University, remedy judgment
- Employment Tribunal – Peak Ong v Aberystwyth University, costs judgment