Cepac’s first Sustainability Report places “Zero Accidents” in the target column. The same report records 29 work-related accidents and 3,150 days lost to work-related injuries and ill health during 2025. Only 70% of employees were covered by ISO 45001 certification, yet Cepac declared itself the best-performing corrugated packaging company in the country. Nobody independently assured the report. Nobody supplied the league table. Cepac wrote the incident card, investigated itself and climbed onto the podium while 3,150 missing days were still coming off the fucking production line.
Zero Is A Flexible Number
Zero is not a complicated number. It contains no moving parts, requires no consultant and should survive contact with the first page of a spreadsheet. Corporate safety reporting is supposed to be the sober end of the brochure, where the photographs stop smiling, the machinery gets a guard and somebody finally enters the figures without help from the awards department. Cepac’s 2025 Sustainability Report reaches that point and places a target beside Employee Health and Safety: “Zero Accidents.”
The result printed beside it is a Lost Time Weighted Injury Rate of 2.49 accidents per 1,000 employees. A page later, the report becomes more specific. Cepac recorded 29 work-related accidents during 2025, comprising 27 minor accidents, one recordable accident and one reportable accident. Somewhere inside the factory, zero has been through a value-engineering exercise and returned with 29 fucking components.
There was improvement. The total fell from 56 accidents in 2023 to 42 in 2024 and then 29 in 2025. That downward movement belongs in the record because TCAP is not frightened of numbers that behave themselves. Unfortunately for Cepac, a falling number does not become zero because the communications department points at the arrow and starts applauding.
The target says zero. The outcome says 29. Between them sits a company hoping the language of continuous improvement can distract from the elementary maths directly beneath it. At Cepac, even nothing apparently needs inspecting before it can be trusted.
3,150 Days Do Not Fit In The Safety Brochure
The larger figure appears further down the control panel. Cepac reports 3,150 days lost to work-related injuries, fatalities and ill health during 2025, producing an absenteeism rate of 2.8%. Elsewhere, the company states that there has never been a workplace fatality at Cepac, leaving injuries and ill health to account for the lost time recorded.
Three thousand one hundred and fifty days is not an unfortunate afternoon near the loading bay. Placed end to end, it is more than eight and a half years. That is not merely lost time. It is a separate career fed into the absence column. Those days belonged to people before Cepac compressed them into a performance indicator: shifts not worked, routines disrupted, production covered by somebody else and homes absorbing whatever followed employees through the factory gates.
The report does not divide the 3,150 days between injury and ill health. Instead, it feeds them into a table beside 807,410 hours worked and presents the result as another managed metric. Corporate reporting has a wonderful talent for making suffering look obedient. A human problem enters the system; a percentage comes out clean enough for the board pack.
Cepac calls the 29 accidents a 31% reduction. Fine. Yet lost days increased from 3,146 in 2024 to 3,150 in 2025, while the absenteeism rate rose from 2.7% to 2.8%. The accident count improved and the time lost did not. Cepac polished one dial while the adjacent gauge moved the wrong fucking way.
The Best Performer Enters Its Own Competition
Having printed the target and outcome together, Cepac awards itself a medal. The report says its Lost Time Weighted Injury Rate made it “the best performer compared to other corrugated packaging competitors in the UK”. That is a national-sized boast arriving without so much as a delivery note.
No competitors are identified. There is no supporting league table, common reporting period, underlying dataset or comparison methodology. The report does not explain whether every rival used the same definition, workforce denominator or injury-weighting formula. Cepac staged a one-entrant competition in its own car park, brought the stopwatch and still declined to publish the result sheet.
Its first Sustainability Report also states that it received no external verification or independent assurance. Even the employee count shifts inside the document. The highlights page says Cepac had 443 employees, while the workforce table records 433 permanent employees plus eight temporary agency workers. The report cannot keep its own headcount still, yet somehow knows with magnificent certainty that the whole British corrugated packaging industry is eating Cepac’s dust.
If the comparison exists somewhere outside the published document, Cepac can fucking publish it. The reader should not have to search the factory cupboards for the evidence behind a national championship claim. Without the table, methodology and independent assurance, this is not benchmarking. It is corporate masturbation with a clipboard, followed by an awards photograph nobody else was invited to.
Where Did Darlington’s Certificate Go?
Certification exposes another loose cable. Cepac’s 2025 highlights state that its Rotherham and Rawcliffe sites hold ISO 45001 certification, covering 70% of employees. Doncaster and Darlington are absent from that statement. Later, the report speaks more broadly about Cepac’s Occupational Health and Safety Management System being certified, allowing the missing 30% to disappear behind a smoother sentence.
Darlington’s absence is particularly entertaining. In December 2020, Cepac announced that the site had achieved ISO 45001 certification five months ahead of schedule. The company celebrated leadership, employee participation, awareness training and a new behavioural-conversation system intended to make safety everybody’s responsibility. Accreditation entered through the front door with a press release and a quote from management.
Five years later, Darlington is missing from the certification highlight and the report offers no explanation. Did the certificate lapse, was the site removed from scope or did Cepac misreport its current coverage? Whichever answer is correct, the certificate appears to have left through the goods entrance without troubling the communications team for a farewell announcement.
ISO 45001 is a management framework for identifying hazards, involving workers and reducing risk. The unexplained gap therefore matters. Cepac cannot make a public spectacle of certification when it arrives, omit the same site later and expect everybody to admire the remaining percentage without asking where the other fucking certificate went.
Mental Wellbeing Left The Training Room
In March 2024, Cepac assembled around 50 managers for a session on safety and wellbeing. The company said the training examined human error, why people behave as they do and the links between wellbeing, mental health and positive thinking. Chief executive Rod Ainslie hoped the presentations would be translated into real-life scenarios across Cepac’s factories.
Five months later, a real-life scenario rang the recruitment line. It did not arrive as a tasteful slide about resilience. It arrived as a disabled person asking for work.
On 21 August 2024, Page Outsourcing rang me about a role at Cepac and offered me an interview for the week after the bank holiday. We discussed the pay and I disclosed that my employment gap was connected to my mental health. Page said it would pass my details on and that I would receive another call to confirm an exact mutually agreeable time. I am still waiting for that call.
When I complained directly to Cepac on 8 October 2024, HR Business Partner Maria Walker said I had not been shortlisted and that the recruiting manager had not known about the mental-health information discussed with Page. She sent that answer before seeing the contemporaneous WhatsApp message recording “Interview next week” and “27k training wage up towards 29.” Cepac had recently trained managers to examine behaviour, mental health and human error. Its HR response examined none of those things before placing the denial on the conveyor.
That is the difference between mental wellbeing as seminar content and mental wellbeing when it arrives carrying a complaint. Seminar mental health is wonderfully obedient. It sits inside PowerPoint, accepts a coffee break and never contacts ACAS. The disabled person outside the training room is messier, remembers what was promised and occasionally keeps the fucking message.
The Reaction Became The Hazard
Cepac’s Sustainability Report says employees can raise incidents, risks and concerns through a safety portal, whistleblowing procedures and grievance channels managed by HR. It also promises a supportive, legally compliant environment protecting the physical and mental wellbeing of every team member. The paperwork understands the route perfectly: report the concern, examine the cause and improve the system. Then my complaint entered the building and the route map caught fire.
The promised interview remained disputed, the contemporaneous message accumulated beside the denial and Cepac hired Horsfield Menzies to build around the claimant. Medical evidence documented depression, anxiety and difficulty regulating emotions under stress. As that evidence stacked up, Cepac and its disability bullies did not become more interested in testing the recruitment decision. They became increasingly desperate to drag the case away from the merits and into conduct.
Horsfield Menzies searched my Tribunal history, deployed medical information, contacted my medical centre and curated 191 pages of emails, blogs and X posts. Cepac’s costs schedules exceeded £50,000. Newcastle Employment Tribunal manufactured the conduct case, proceeded in my absence on 24 April 2026, struck out the claims and ordered me to pay Cepac £20,000. The disability-discrimination merits were never tried. The reaction got indexed, bundled and wheeled into court on an industrial pallet while the original complaint remained at the factory gate.
That machinery now sits beside Cepac’s language about root causes, mental wellbeing and supportive reporting. A physical incident receives a portal, a review and a prevention strategy. Disability-linked distress received surveillance, pressure, a costs schedule and a purpose-built conduct architecture. Every reaction became material for the next round, creating a fucking ratchet in which the pressure produced the evidence used to justify more pressure. Cepac’s disability bullies did not eliminate the hazard. They renamed the injured party as one.
The Safety Card Cannot Count To Zero
Cepac published every central number in this article itself. The target is zero accidents. The outcome is 29. Lost time reached 3,150 days. Certification covered 70% of employees, despite an earlier announcement that leaves Darlington’s later absence unexplained. Even the headcount changes between pages, as though ten employees wandered off while the report was at the printer.
Then comes the self-awarded gold medal. Cepac calls itself the best performer without publishing the competitors, table or method, inside a report that explicitly lacks independent assurance. That is not transparency. It is a company writing “winner” on its own inspection sticker, slapping it onto the machine and hoping nobody checks who held the clipboard.
The human contradiction is filthier. Cepac trained managers on behaviour, wellbeing and mental health in March 2024. By August, a disabled candidate had disclosed the mental-health reason for his employment gap during a call offering an interview. The promised confirmation never arrived. By October, HR had denied the interview before seeing the message. Eventually Cepac and Newcastle Employment Tribunal counted the candidate’s distressed reactions with vastly greater enthusiasm than either applied to the original complaint.
Cepac can count to 3,150 when absence disrupts production and to 191 pages when distress assists a defence. It still cannot count one promised interview. Zero accidents was the target. Zero accountability is the only target Cepac has fucking hit.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cepac – Sustainability Report 2025
- Cepac – Safety And Wellbeing, March 2024
- Cepac – Darlington Achieves ISO 45001 Health And Safety Certification
- Cepac – Rawcliffe Marks 1,000 Days Accident Free
- Health And Safety Executive – RIDDOR Reportable Incidents
- ISO – ISO 45001 Occupational Health And Safety Management Systems
- TCAP – It’s Only IRN-BRU Again! The Supplier Code That Stops At The Display Stand
- TCAP – Newcastle Employment Tribunal : Deliberate Maladministration
- Employment Tribunal – Thompson v Cepac Limited And Page Outsourcing UK Limited