Horsfield Menzies has spent much of this series helpfully publishing the standards against which its own behaviour can be measured. Disability. Investigations. Equality. Mental health. Victimisation. Every few clicks, another polished employment-law lesson appears and another section of the Cepac file starts waving from the other side of the room.
Rachel Yorke’s article may be the most useful yet. On 27 May 2026, Horsfield Menzies published “TRIBUNAL REFORM: THE SYSTEM IS BUCKLING.” The article said outstanding single Employment Tribunal cases had risen by 15,000 to 58,000. More importantly, Yorke did not describe the consequences as something Horsfield Menzies had simply picked up from a press release. She wrote that “from our own experience” hearings were regularly being listed two to four years into the future and could still disappear at the last minute because of a lack of judicial resource.
Horsfield Menzies therefore knew the consequences too. More cost. More stress. More uncertainty. A justice system short of time, carrying too much volume and struggling to provide the judicial resource required to deal with it.
Excellent.
They fucking knew.
They Knew The Weakness
That knowledge matters because Horsfield Menzies was not merely observing a slow Tribunal system from the safety of its blog. At the same time, it was litigating inside one and representing Cepac in a disability-discrimination case whose underlying factual dispute was remarkably compact.
Page Outsourcing called me on 21 August 2024 about a production role at Cepac. During that conversation, Page offered me an interview for after the bank holiday, discussed the salary and asked about my employment gap. I disclosed that the gap related to my mental health. A contemporaneous WhatsApp sent that same day recorded “Interview next week” and “27k training wage up towards 29”.
At that point, no Tribunal claim existed. TCAP did not exist either. Horsfield Menzies had not entered the room. Then the expected confirmation never came.
Later, Cepac denied that Page had offered an interview. Its own ET3 also created the knowledge problem TCAP has documented repeatedly: one part distances Cepac from disability knowledge while another records health information inside the recruitment narrative. Those were merits questions. What did Page say? What did Page record? What reached Cepac? Where did the health information come from? Why did the expected interview disappear?
Put the records beside the witnesses and decide what happened.
Instead, something very different happened.
A Simple Claim Meets 1,941 Pages
On 10 March 2026, Employment Judge T. R. Smith described the case as a “simple claim”. By then, the Tribunal file stood at approximately 1,941 pages.
Those two facts belong beside each other because they tell the story almost without assistance. A simple claim had become a file approaching two thousand pages.
The litigation had travelled an extraordinary distance from one recruitment call in August 2024. Horsfield Menzies had already served a bundle exceeding 600 pages for the May 2025 hearing. Thereafter came continuing arguments over medical evidence, hearing attendance, correspondence, conduct, applications, public hearings, costs, case management and eventually whether the claimant should remain in the proceedings at all.
As that procedural case expanded, the original recruitment dispute became a smaller and smaller part of the litigation built around it. That was not harmless clutter, particularly because Horsfield Menzies’ own blog explains exactly what happens when complexity meets a justice system already short of time.
Complexity Is Different When The System Is Already Fucked
A comfortably resourced Tribunal can absorb complexity. A Tribunal system that is already “buckling” cannot.
Every additional dispute consumes judicial time. Applications require handling, expanded bundles require navigating and procedural arguments generate hearings. Those hearings produce orders, orders create further disputes about compliance and correspondence creates still more correspondence. Throughout all of that, the original merits remain waiting in the queue.
Horsfield Menzies knew this environment existed because Horsfield Menzies fucking said so. It knew hearings could take years, judicial resource was scarce and delay produced cost, stress and uncertainty. Above all, it knew the machine was struggling with volume.
Yet its strategy in Cepac did not simplify the dispute and drive the recruitment evidence towards determination. Instead, it helped turn a simple claim into a procedural industry.
That distinction is the whole article.
The Backlog Became Useful
The Employment Tribunal backlog was not something Horsfield Menzies created. It was something Horsfield Menzies already knew how to navigate, and once judicial capacity becomes scarce, complexity acquires tactical value.
A case focused on five or six factual questions remains relatively easy to understand. By contrast, a case surrounded by thousands of pages, repeated applications, arguments over conduct, medical evidence, attendance and correspondence presents an entirely different case-management problem. Whoever succeeds in changing the question therefore changes the battlefield.
At the beginning, the question was whether disability influenced what happened during Cepac’s recruitment process. Eventually, the dominant question became whether Lee Thompson’s conduct meant the case should continue at all.
That movement was not accidental drift. Horsfield Menzies repeatedly chose to build and advance the procedural case against me. My reacrive emails became evidence. Complaints became evidence. TCAP became evidence. Posts on X became evidence. Previous litigation entered the picture and disability-linked reactions became material for the conduct case.
As Blog vs Behaviour has already documented, Horsfield Menzies assembled dedicated collections of communications, blog material and X posts for strike-out purposes.
The merits did not receive anything approaching the same fucking enthusiasm.
Make The Claim Harder To Hear
This is where the strategy becomes brutally simple. If the Tribunal is already drowning, you do not merely defend the allegation. You make the claimant the bigger problem.
Enlarge the procedural footprint. Keep the Tribunal looking at correspondence, behaviour, applications and case management. Build the documentary record around the claimant while increasing the amount of judicial resource required simply to keep the case moving.
Eventually, the question changes from “Did disability discrimination occur?” to “How the fuck are we supposed to manage this case?”
Once that happens, the overloaded system starts doing part of the work for you. The structural weakness becomes leverage.
Horsfield Menzies already knew the weakness existed before the decisive hearing.
Its own website proves it.
The Merits Disappeared
By April 2026, the underlying recruitment case still contained obvious factual questions requiring determination. The same-day WhatsApp still existed, Maria Walker’s denial still pre-dated her knowledge of that contemporaneous record and the ET3 still contained the health-information problem. Page also still held recruitment records capable of illuminating what happened during the August call and afterwards.
None of those questions vanished because the litigation file got bigger. Instead, the expanding procedural case buried them.
On 24 April 2026, the Tribunal proceeded without me and heard the respondents’ strike-out and costs case. The resulting judgment struck out my claims because of conduct and ordered £20,000 in costs to Cepac. Lol.
Horsfield Menzies therefore achieved something much more useful to its client than winning the recruitment dispute on the evidence.
Nobody had to decide it.
The Page call never received a completed merits determination. Neither did the vanished interview. The route taken by the health information remained unresolved, while the contradiction between the contemporaneous record and the later corporate position survived without determination.
Ultimately, the conduct case reached the finish line.
The discrimination case never fucking got there.
Horsfield Menzies Had Already Diagnosed The Disease
Now return to Rachel Yorke’s article.
Horsfield Menzies says the system is buckling. According to the firm, judicial resource is inadequate, cases face years of delay and that delay creates cost, stress and uncertainty. Then comes the proposed cure: keep disputes focused, resolve them earlier, encourage settlement and introduce a tiered structure in which simple cases receive simpler treatment.
Apparently, simplicity is extremely sensible on the blog.
The Cepac file went the other way. A judicially described “simple claim” grew towards two thousand pages while the factual issue at its centre remained unresolved. Procedure increased. Correspondence increased. Hearings increased. Costs increased. Argument about the claimant expanded while the merits receded.
Horsfield Menzies did not stumble unknowingly into an overloaded system.
It knew exactly what system it was operating inside.
Then Comes “Skin In The Game”
Yorke’s article gets even better. For more complex cases, it discusses early judicial evaluation and potential cost consequences so that both sides have “skin in the game”. Horsfield Menzies also complains that AI can embolden claimants to overestimate their prospects and compensation.
Once again, put the Cepac file beside the blog.
I was an unemployed litigant in person. Cepac had professional solicitors. The system carried a backlog Horsfield Menzies already knew was severe. The litigation expanded massively, Cepac’s combined costs schedules eventually exceeded £50,000 and the merits never reached determination.
Finally, a £20,000 costs order landed on the disabled claimant whose recruitment allegation remained unanswered.
There is your fucking skin.
This Is What Exploiting A Structural Weakness Looks Like
Nobody needed to telephone Newcastle Employment Tribunal and request a special backlog. The backlog already existed. Nor did anybody need to instruct a judge to dislike a large, difficult file. The resource pressure already existed too.
Horsfield Menzies simply needed to understand the terrain.
And it did.
Its own blog says so.
TCAP’s conclusion is therefore straightforward: Horsfield Menzies knowingly conducted the Cepac litigation in a manner that exploited a structural weakness it had already identified. The firm helped drag a simple claim away from its factual merits, built an increasingly enormous procedural case around the claimant and placed that case before a Tribunal system it already knew was struggling for judicial capacity.
As the procedural problem grew, the discrimination claim became easier to eclipse.
Eventually, that is exactly what happened.
This is not clever hindsight from TCAP.
Horsfield Menzies supplied the fucking operating manual.
The Blog Says Simplify
This may be the purest Blog vs Behaviour entry yet because the contradiction needs almost no decoration.
Blog: The Tribunal system is buckling.
Behaviour: Help turn a simple claim into a 1,941-page file.
Blog: Judicial resource is scarce.
Behaviour: Keep expanding the procedural battlefield.
Blog: Delay creates cost, stress and uncertainty.
Behaviour: Build a case in which cost, stress and procedural pressure become central features.
Blog: Simple cases need simpler handling.
Behaviour: Make the claimant, his emails, reactions, medical evidence, complaints, blog and X account part of the case.
Blog: Encourage realistic settlement and early evaluation.
Behaviour: Spend tens of thousands creating a route to strike-out before the recruitment merits receive a completed hearing.
By the end, Horsfield Menzies did not need to defeat the allegation that began the proceedings. It had helped create something much larger than the allegation: something harder to manage, more expensive to hear and perfectly shaped for a system already complaining that it could not cope.
The backlog was not merely a problem Horsfield Menzies understood.
It became part of the terrain on which Horsfield Menzies chose to fight.
They Fucking Knew
That is the line running through the entire file.
Horsfield Menzies knew the Tribunal system was buckling and judicial capacity was scarce. It knew complexity generated further cost, stress and uncertainty, while its own article recognised that simple cases needed simpler treatment.
Yet, in Cepac, a simple recruitment dispute moved relentlessly away from its merits and towards a vast procedural fight about the disabled claimant bringing it. Eventually, that procedural case consumed the underlying case completely.
Strike-out. £20,000 costs. No completed merits hearing.
The Tribunal never determined whether Page offered the interview, what happened after the mental-health disclosure or why the expected confirmation disappeared.
What remained was a fucking enormous file and an exit door.
Rachel Yorke wrote the diagnosis.
Horsfield Menzies supplied the case study.
THE SYSTEM IS BUCKLING.
Yes.
You fucking knew.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Horsfield Menzies – Tribunal Reform: The System Is Buckling
- TCAP – Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour – Investigate The Reaction, Not The Complaint
- TCAP – Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour – When Misconduct Meets Disability, Unless It Is Lee Thompson
- TCAP – Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour – Sam Butler’s Equality Clocks Off When Cepac Calls
- TCAP – Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour – Calum Maclean Found Compassion Two Days After The Judgment
- TCAP – Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour – Victimisation For Dummies
- TCAP – The Cepac Files : Asda II And The Medical-History Checkout
- TCAP case file – duty judge correspondence dated 10 March 2026; respondent hearing bundles and submissions; strike-out evidence collections; costs schedules; Cepac ET3 Grounds of Resistance; WhatsApp record dated 21 August 2024; Maria Walker correspondence; Page Outsourcing recruitment material.