The Warburtons Cepac supplier code bans disability discrimination in recruitment, requires agency workers to receive fairness and respect and says harassment or intimidation must never be permitted. Meanwhile, Cepac’s live 2026 website still calls Warburtons its longstanding customer. The first article found the family values. Part Two brings Maria Walker, the same-day WhatsApp receipt and the £50,000 bill for keeping the original complaint away from a merits hearing.
Part One Left The Family A File
Part One, The Cepac Files : Warburtons Disability Discrimination – Sliced Bullshit, established three things Warburtons cannot push back into the bread bin. An Employment Tribunal found that Warburtons committed disability discrimination against a driver with generalised anxiety disorder. Warburtons publishes values claiming that it always does the right thing. Finally, Cepac’s current community page describes Warburtons as its “longstanding customer”.
Indeed, that page remains live on Cepac’s 2026 website. It does not hide Warburtons inside a historical client list or ask readers to reconstruct the relationship from an old photograph. Cepac presently places the bakery inside its public account of community work and calls it a customer in the fucking present-tense shop window.
Part One asked whether Warburtons’ supplier due diligence extended beyond price, delivery and boxes surviving the rain. However, the later Cepac Files articles exposed a sharper test that the first article did not yet possess in full. The Page Outsourcing call now sits beside the same-day WhatsApp record. Moreover, Maria Walker’s denial carries a timestamp. Cepac’s ET3 preserved the health information it wanted treated as absent, while the medical-centre intrusion and conduct dossier explain how the original recruitment facts escaped trial.
Consequently, this is not Sliced Bullshit reheated. Warburtons wrote a supplier code that reaches directly into the agency and recruitment chain. Cepac and Page then provided the fucking worked example.
Warburtons Wrote The Agency Clause
Warburtons presents its farmers, suppliers and retail partners as an extended family joined by quality and care. Its Supplier Code of Conduct converts that soft-focus family photograph into rules. Specifically, suppliers must obey applicable law, maintain written policies and comply with standards drawn from the Ethical Trading Initiative, International Labour Organization conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Most importantly, the code does not leave recruitment agencies outside the frame. Agencies used to supply workers must hold the required certification and operate under terms that define the responsibilities and obligations on both sides. Moreover, Warburtons says agency workers must receive fairness and respect at all times.
Then comes recruitment itself. The code prohibits discrimination in recruitment based on disability. It also states that verbal abuse, harassment and intimidation must never be permitted. Finally, suppliers must provide information Warburtons reasonably requests to demonstrate compliance and their ethical approach.
In practice, that wording was not written for a philosophical discussion over tea and Toastie. It regulates the commercial corridor involved here: a supplier, a recruitment agency, a disabled applicant, a grievance and records capable of showing what happened. Page handled the call. Cepac received the candidate information. Meanwhile, Warburtons buys from the company at the end of that corridor and publishes the rules hanging over it.
The code therefore supplies a better question than whether Cepac can make a decent box. Can Cepac survive its customer reading the fucking paperwork in the correct order?
Page Put An Interview On The Production Line
Page Outsourcing called me on 21 August 2024 about the Cepac role. During that conversation, Page offered an interview for the week after the bank holiday and discussed a £27,000 training wage rising towards £29,000. I explained that treatment for my mental health accounted for the lengthy gap in my employment.
The next step sounded ordinary. Page would send my details forward and call again to agree the exact interview time. Meanwhile, no dispute existed, nobody had contacted ACAS and TCAP had not published a word about Cepac. The process still looked like recruitment rather than the opening scene of a £50,000 character prosecution.
That promised call never arrived. However, a WhatsApp message recorded the outcome on the same day as the Page conversation. It said “Interview next week” and “27k training wage up towards 29”. Moreover, the recipient kept the exchange and later supplied a witness statement confirming where it came from and what it recorded.
Those two lines matter because nobody created them for litigation. They emerged from the unremarkable habit of telling another person what happened after a telephone call. For example, no solicitor had prepared a defence and no HR manager had chosen a replacement history. The receipt existed before the fucking bakery of denial opened for business.
Warburtons’ code says agency arrangements should identify responsibilities and obligations. Excellent. Accordingly, ask Page for the call recording, recruiter notes, candidate-status changes and audit trail. Then ask Cepac what entered its system, who saw the mental-health information and why the interview confirmation disappeared.
Maria Walker Replaced It At 09:52
At 04:35 on 8 October 2024, I complained directly to Cepac. My email set out the interview offer, its planned bank-holiday timing, Page’s promised confirmation call and the questions about my employment gap. It also recorded my mental-health treatment disclosure.
Maria Walker, Cepac’s HR Business Partner, replied at 09:52. She said Page had conducted an initial screening and sent a group of potential candidates’ CVs to Cepac. Walker then supplied the new history: “I can see that your CV was sent to the recruiting manager with a group of potential candidates and unfortunately you were not shortlisted on that occasion”.
Her answer turned an offered interview into a failure to shortlist. Moreover, Walker maintained that the recruiting manager would not have known about the mental-health information and treated the clash between the two accounts as “confusion”. She wrote all of that before she knew the WhatsApp record existed.
Consequently, the evidence fixes the order. Page offered the interview and discussed the wage. Meanwhile, I disclosed my mental health and a message preserved the result that day. The confirmation vanished. Afterwards, Walker replaced the interview with a failed shortlist while the receipt remained outside her field of view.
In effect, Warburtons’ agency clause now stops looking like procurement wallpaper. The code requires defined responsibilities, fair treatment and compliance information. Maria Walker’s 09:52 answer should therefore have a supporting file. Otherwise, the family values have been baked around a fucking hole.
The ET3 Could Not Lose The Health Information
Cepac’s ET3 later attempted to distance the company from knowledge relevant to disability. Paragraph 12 built the partition. However, paragraph 14 recorded recruitment information stating that I had spent around twelve months out of work because of health problems and felt ready to return.
In other words, one paragraph wanted the decision-maker kept clean of disability knowledge. The next paragraph carried the health information through the wall like a flour-covered handprint nobody had remembered to wipe away.
Therefore, that information entered Cepac’s pleaded defence from somewhere. Page retained it, transmitted it or included it in material that moved through the recruitment process. Cepac possessed enough of the account to use my health when explaining the employment gap, yet it still wanted the Tribunal to accept a safely disconnected recruitment decision.
A merits hearing could have followed the route. For example, counsel could have questioned Page about the call and the vanished confirmation. System records could have shown when the candidate status changed, while Walker could have explained what she reviewed before 09:52. The same-day message and witness evidence could then have met the corporate replacement history in open court.
Instead, Cepac moved the machinery onto me. The contradiction stayed in the file. My reactions became the product.
Cepac Turned A Grievance Into A Conduct Product
Warburtons requires suppliers to treat people with fairness and respect. By contrast, Cepac chose to bully me, invade my privacy and weaponise my reactions by turning them into “conduct”. It then spent more than £50,000 doing it because that strategy offered an escape from the one place its recruitment account had to survive: a merits hearing.
Moreover, acting for Cepac, Horsfield Menzies contacted my medical centre and investigated appointment availability. The firm used the result against a postponement application even though I had supplied medical evidence to establish disability and explain the adjustment required for safe participation. Cepac’s lawyers treated access to healthcare as a litigation lead, checked the reception desk and carried the answer back to the bundle.
Meanwhile, the wider operation collected my emails, complaints, articles and X posts into a 191-page conduct dossier. Cepac searched my litigation history and deployed medical information. As a result, pressure produced disability-related reactions, then the company stripped those reactions of the pressure and medical context before feeding the remains into a misconduct case.
That was not grievance handling. Instead, it was a conversion line. A complaint about disability discrimination entered at one end. At the other came a disabled claimant recast as the corporate emergency, complete with schedules, counsel, solicitors and a bill large enough to fund a serious investigation several times over.
Consequently, Warburtons says harsh or inhumane treatment and intimidation must never be permitted. Cepac did not merely miss the standard. It assembled a fucking factory demonstration and sent the invoice to the merits.
Newcastle Supplied The Industrial Slicer
The escape route appears in Newcastle Employment Tribunal : Deep Dive – Deliberate Maladministration, Disability Shaming, Judicial White Knights, Speed-reader Smith And The Horsfield Menzies Feeding Frenzy. In practice, Cepac needed the case to become a trial of my reactions. Newcastle supplied the institutional appetite and procedural conditions.
Correspondence travelled to the wrong Tribunal office. Meanwhile, claimant applications and medical context disappeared into administrative fog while respondent material received attention. Employment Judge T. R. Smith said he spent three hours reviewing a 1,941-page file and called me its “principle culprit”. Then, three days before the decisive hearing, Employment Judge Brain refused the postponement required for my safe participation.
Employment Judge James proceeded without me on 24 April 2026. He struck out the claims and later ordered me to pay £20,000 in costs. Yet no merits decision determined whether Page offered the interview, why the confirmation vanished, what Page passed to Cepac, how the ET3 obtained the health information or why Maria Walker’s account collided with the same-day WhatsApp record.
Consequently, the agency and recruitment evidence never reached the examination Warburtons’ code assumes responsible businesses can withstand. The Tribunal concentrated on the reactions. Cepac and Horsfield Menzies supplied them by the pallet, detached from the disability and pressure that produced them.
Ultimately, Newcastle manufactured the cutting mechanism. Cepac held the file against it until the original complaint fell away and only the conduct slices remained.
Always Do The Right Thing Meets 09:52
Warburtons says doing the right thing guides how it works and makes decisions. It calls suppliers part of its extended family and says those businesses share its passion for quality and care. Fine. Families sometimes inherit difficult paperwork. Serious ones open it.
Part One showed that Warburtons already understands disability discrimination from the respondent’s side of a Tribunal hearing. However, this second file is different. Here, Warburtons sits above a supplier code that explicitly covers disability discrimination in recruitment, agency responsibilities, fair treatment, intimidation and the production of compliance information.
First, the company can request the Page call evidence, recruiter notes, candidate-status history, Maria Walker review material, ET3 drafting trail, medical-centre correspondence, conduct dossier and costs schedules. It can ask why a complaint about a missing interview generated more than £50,000 of aggression but never generated a merits answer. Finally, Warburtons can decide whether Cepac’s treatment belongs anywhere near a supply chain carrying the words family, responsibility and care.
However, no celebrity narrator can perform this bit. Morgan Freeman cannot lower his voice until the timeline becomes wholesome. Samuel L. Jackson cannot shout the WhatsApp receipt out of existence. Meanwhile, Robert De Niro cannot stare at paragraph 14 until it forgets where the health information came from.
The decision belongs to Warburtons. Its live supplier relationship sits beside its live values and its published code. Page made the call. The message recorded the interview. Walker replaced it at 09:52. Cepac then bullied the disabled complainant, invaded his privacy, packaged the reactions as conduct and spent £50,000 buying an exit from the merits.
Warburtons says it always does the right thing.
The fucking batch code is on the file.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- The Cepac Files : Warburtons Disability Discrimination – Sliced Bullshit
- Cepac: Cepac And The Community
- Warburtons: Supplier Code Of Conduct
- Warburtons: Our Values
- Employment Tribunal: Mr J Kofkin v Warburtons Limited
- The Cepac Files: KFC II – Maria Walker And The Interview Receipt
- Newcastle Employment Tribunal : Deep Dive – Deliberate Maladministration
- Employment Tribunal: Thompson v Cepac Limited And Page Outsourcing UK Limited
- TCAP case file: WhatsApp record dated 21 August 2024; email exchange between Lee Thompson and Cepac HR Business Partner Maria Walker dated 8 October 2024; supporting witness statement dated 20 February 2025; Cepac ET3 Grounds of Resistance; respondent costs schedules, submissions and medical-information correspondence.