The Marks & Spencer Cepac supplier grievance arrives with two branded displays, three dated exhibits and an investigation procedure that mirrors the evidence. Cepac’s POS Portfolio 2026 shows M&S Food Harry Potter confectionery and an M&S Valentine’s unit. Meanwhile, M&S requires evidence-based complaints, interviews, corrective-action monitoring and protection from retaliation throughout its supply chain. The WhatsApp receipt, Maria Walker’s denial and Cepac’s ET3 are ready for the till.
Two M&S Displays In Cepac’s Shop Window
Page three of Cepac’s POS Portfolio 2026 contains two unmistakable pieces of Marks & Spencer work. One floor-standing unit carries the M&S Food logo above Harry Potter and Wizarding World confectionery. Beside it, another display holds M&S-branded Valentine’s chocolates beneath a large pink Valentine’s Day header.
Consequently, Cepac chose both photographs for its own sales document. This is not a logo inferred from a stray box, a forgotten social-media post or somebody standing near the right loading bay. The packaging company placed M&S-branded display work inside the portfolio it uses to demonstrate what it can produce.
However, the document does not identify the commissioning dates, contracting entities or present commercial status. Marks & Spencer holds those answers. Its procurement team can establish whether Cepac contracted directly, worked through another supplier or produced the units under some earlier arrangement. It can also say when the work occurred and whether any relationship continues.
That is the first task. The second is harder. M&S must decide what its own supplier standards require when the company displaying its brand also carries an unresolved disability-recruitment trail, a contemporaneous interview receipt and a legal campaign costing more than £50,000.
The cardboard is visible. Now the commercial and ethical records need to come out of the stockroom.
M&S Has Already Written The Procedure
Marks & Spencer published its Grievance Procedure for Supply Chains in May 2026. It promises timely, transparent and responsible action when human-rights concerns arise. Investigations should remain independent and fair, while people raising concerns should receive protection from retaliation, intimidation and other adverse consequences.
Specifically, the scope includes Goods Not For Resale, or GNFR. M&S defines that category elsewhere as products and services bought to run the company, including store equipment and design. A cardboard display carrying the company brand sits close enough for procurement to identify the route without pretending the aisle has become impossibly complicated.
More importantly, the procedure tells complainants what qualifies. The complaint should concern a possible violation of M&S’s sourcing, conduct or human-rights rules, arise within its supply chain and carry supporting evidence. M&S then assigns the initial assessment to ESG or a colleague responsible for human rights in the relevant business unit.
Its opening language speaks about workers, while this complaint comes from an applicant. However, the Global Sourcing Principles expressly prohibit disability discrimination in hiring. M&S cannot make exclusion from employment the reason its hiring rule becomes inaccessible. If it reads the grievance channel more narrowly, the company must identify how a rejected applicant reports the very breach its supplier code anticipates.
Crucially, this file does not ask M&S to investigate a rumour. It contains dates, names, pleadings, correspondence, a witness statement, costs schedules and a same-day message created before any dispute existed. The evidence already carries its barcode.
The Marks & Spencer Cepac supplier grievance therefore begins exactly where the company’s procedure says it should: with a documented concern and a request for a thorough enquiry.
Two Lines Before Anybody Needed A Case
On 21 August 2024, Page Outsourcing called me about a production role at Cepac. 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 also explained that mental-health treatment accounted for the gap in my employment.
Page said another call would confirm an exact, mutually agreeable interview time. That confirmation never arrived. However, I had already sent a WhatsApp message recording the good news on the same day:
“Interview next week”
“27k training wage up towards 29”
Moreover, the recipient retained the conversation and later supplied a witness statement dated 20 February 2025 confirming its origin and context. At the time of the message, there was no ACAS process, litigation strategy or public campaign to serve. Someone had offered me an interview, so I told a friend.
Consequently, the two lines make unusually useful evidence. They preserve the immediate account before lawyers and corporate explanations entered the story. Page’s call notes, candidate-status history, communications and any recording can now test it. M&S’s procedure calls for supporting and corroborating information. The receipt already points investigators towards both.
Maria Walker Supplied A Different History
At 04:35 on 8 October 2024, I complained directly to Cepac. The email described the offered interview, its expected timing after the bank holiday, the promised confirmation call and the mental-health disclosure. Cepac therefore received a specific recruitment complaint requiring a specific answer.
Maria Walker, Cepac’s HR Business Partner, replied at 09:52. She said Page had sent my CV to the recruiting manager with a group of possible candidates, but that I “was not shortlisted on that occasion”. Walker maintained that the manager would not have known about the mental-health information. Finally, she apologised because Page had supposedly failed to explain that I had not secured an interview.
Walker had not seen the WhatsApp when she answered. Consequently, Cepac adopted the failed-shortlisting account before it knew that a same-day message preserved the interview and wage discussion. Calling the difference confusion did not reconcile the two histories.
M&S’s procedure tells investigators to gather complete information from every party and interview relevant people. Fine. Ask what Walker examined during those five hours and seventeen minutes. Establish whom she contacted, what Page supplied and which record justified the answer. Then compare it with the message she had not seen.
Ultimately, that is not an extravagant compliance exercise. It is the basic quality control M&S performs before deciding which account belongs on the shelf.
Paragraph 12 Meets Paragraph 14
Cepac’s Grounds of Resistance added a second contradiction. Paragraph 12 distanced the company from knowledge relevant to my disability. However, paragraph 14 recorded that I had spent around twelve months out of work because of health problems and felt ready to return. Health information sat inside Cepac’s recruitment narrative while the company resisted the knowledge attached to it.
The extract below comes from Cepac Ltd’s Grounds of Resistance.
Therefore, somebody supplied that material. The evidential route should show whether Page recorded it, passed it to Cepac or placed it inside documents later used to prepare the defence. Accordingly, investigators need the call record, access history, candidate notes and instructions behind paragraph 14.
The WhatsApp, Walker email and ET3 form one connected sequence. First comes the offered interview and health disclosure. Next comes the vanished confirmation and Walker’s no-interview account. Finally, Cepac’s pleading uses health-related information while distancing the business from disability knowledge.
A merits hearing should have tested that sequence through disclosure and cross-examination. It never did. M&S now has three exhibits and a procedure expressly designed to ask where corroborating information can be found.
M&S Wrote The Recruitment Standard Too
Marks & Spencer’s Global Sourcing Principles apply to entities supplying goods and services across Food, Clothing and Home, and Goods Not For Resale. They require supplier partners to treat workers with dignity and prohibit discrimination in hiring based on disability. The same document rejects harassment, verbal abuse, mental coercion and intimidation.
Its definition of workers extends beyond permanent employees. Temporary, seasonal and training arrangements appear within the framework. That matters because Page operated the recruitment corridor while Cepac received the candidates. An agency handover does not make the person travelling through it invisible.
Moreover, the principles require an accessible grievance mechanism involving an appropriate level of management. Complaints should receive a prompt, understandable and transparent response, including timely feedback and protection from retaliation or retribution. Vulnerable groups should receive heightened protection and remedy through supplier due diligence.
Now put those requirements beside the record. The recruitment question concerns disability, the complaint reached Cepac’s HR Business Partner, and the later legal strategy centred on the conduct of the disabled complainant. M&S does not need to stretch its language to reach the facts. Hiring, disability, intimidation, vulnerability and grievance handling already appear in the fucking rulebook.
If Cepac supplied M&S through an intermediary, that route needs mapping rather than hand-waving. The branded displays show where to begin. M&S can identify every entity between its purchase order and Cepac’s factory, then determine which contractual and supply-chain obligations travelled with the work.
The Procedure Asks Every Right Question
The striking part of M&S’s grievance procedure is not its vocabulary but its checklist. Specifically, the initial assessment asks whether the issue occurred in the current supply chain, whether another route is pursuing the grievance, where supporting evidence can be found, whether a formal complaint or court case exists, whether the issue arose before and which other organisations hold relevant information.
Here, every useful answer is already waiting. Cepac’s portfolio establishes the branded-work enquiry. The WhatsApp and witness statement supply contemporaneous corroboration. My 8 October email records the formal complaint. The Employment Tribunal file documents the litigation. Page Outsourcing, Cepac, Horsfield Menzies, Shears Law and HMCTS hold different parts of the wider record.
Next, M&S calls for an internal investigation, potentially using an independent third party. Its process includes assessing evidence, interviewing relevant people, checking whether the problem remains current, examining corrective action and testing whether governance and local grievance mechanisms worked.
Therefore, that is the audit plan. First, interview the Page personnel involved in the call and the Cepac decision-makers who received the recruitment material. Then ask Walker what supported her answer and trace paragraph 14 to its source. Finally, examine what Cepac did after the complaint and whether anybody corrected the original failure.
The procedure even asks what remedy the complainant wants. Start with an evidence-based explanation and accountable findings. M&S wrote the questions itself. TCAP has merely delivered the unusually well-organised fucking answers.
Cepac Made The Complainant The Complaint
In March 2025, Horsfield Menzies estimated Cepac’s legal costs at £25,000 to £30,000 and offered not to pursue them if the discrimination claim disappeared. The firm directed that pressure at a disabled litigant in person who had reported financial hardship, worsening mental health and serious difficulty participating safely.
Meanwhile, the operation expanded. Cepac assembled correspondence, complaints, TCAP articles and posts on X into a 191-page conduct dossier. Its legal case stripped away the disability, medical deterioration and procedural failures surrounding my reactions, then presented those reactions as free-standing reasons to end the proceedings.
Consequently, Cepac chose to bully me, invade my privacy and weaponise the responses its pressure helped produce. Through Horsfield Menzies, it converted the person raising the discrimination complaint into the main object under investigation. The recruitment evidence remained underneath while Cepac displayed the claimant’s language to the Tribunal as the product.
Ultimately, combined costs schedules exceeded £50,000. That expenditure did not produce a tested answer about Page’s call, Walker’s denial or the health information inside paragraph 14. Instead, it helped Cepac secure an exit before witnesses faced cross-examination on the recruitment facts.
M&S says its grievance process should protect the complainant from retaliation throughout. This record shows why those words matter. A mechanism fails when the organisation receiving a complaint can turn sustained resistance into the offence and then cite the resulting distress as proof that the complainant never deserved an answer.
The Medical Centre Entered The File
Horsfield Menzies contacted my medical centre for Cepac, investigated appointment availability and used the resulting information to oppose a postponement. I had supplied medical evidence to establish disability and explain why I required adjustments for safe participation. Cepac’s lawyers used that evidence as the route towards my healthcare arrangements.
Although the firm maintained that the centre disclosed no private medical information, the contact itself remains documented and reviewable. Who authorised it? What precisely did the solicitors ask? What did the centre provide? Which assessment considered the privacy and disability implications before the information entered an adversarial submission?
Meanwhile, M&S’s Global Sourcing Principles require supplier partners to safeguard privacy and confidential information. Its Human Rights Policy separately identifies privacy and health among the basic rights the company respects. Therefore, those commitments give procurement and ESG a reason to obtain the instructions, attendance notes, correspondence and submissions surrounding the medical-centre contact.
The imbalance is hard to miss. Cepac’s representatives found the energy to investigate whether I could obtain a medical appointment while the disputed interview call remained unresolved. They scrutinised access to treatment more effectively than the recruitment event that caused the claim.
Consequently, M&S’s procedure requires an evidence-based assessment of adverse impact and governance. Place the medical-centre trail beside the disability evidence, postponement requests and conduct dossier. Then decide whether the supplier handled vulnerability with the dignity, protection and fucking care promised by the policy.
Anti-Retaliation Cannot Remain Decorative
Marks & Spencer says safeguarding anyone who raises a concern is a priority. Its supply-chain procedure promises a strict anti-retaliation approach, investigation of every report and remedial action when investigators confirm retaliation. Possible responses include warnings to business partners and legal or governmental remedies.
Moreover, the Global Sourcing Principles go further. Suppliers must not engage in threats, intimidation or physical or legal attacks against human-rights defenders, including people exercising freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly and protest. M&S repeats that commitment in its March 2026 Human Rights Policy.
Accordingly, that language belongs beside Cepac’s conduct campaign. The company and its solicitors collected my public criticism, complaints and correspondence, characterised the material as harassment and used it to seek strike-out and costs. Meanwhile, the same company never supplied a merits-tested answer to the interview evidence from which the criticism grew.
Therefore, M&S can assess the application of its clauses after reading the complete record. What it cannot credibly do is publish protection from retaliation while refusing to examine a supplier’s use of legal pressure against the person raising a disability complaint. The policy exists for the difficult case, not the comfortable one.
Ultimately, corporate values become meaningful at the point of commercial inconvenience. Before that, they are just nice typography placed near the annual report.
Newcastle Closed The Case, Not The Questions
The institutional machinery appears in Newcastle Employment Tribunal : Deep Dive : Deliberate Maladministration, Disability Shaming, Judicial White Knights, Speed-reader Smith And The Horsfield Menzies Feeding Frenzy. It records misdirected correspondence, uncertainty surrounding a file approaching two thousand pages and the handling of applications concerning my ability to participate.
Employment Judge T. R. Smith said he spent three hours reviewing a 1,941-page file and called me its “principle culprit”. Three days before the decisive hearing, Employment Judge Brain refused the postponement required for safe participation. On 24 April 2026, Employment Judge James proceeded without me, struck out the claims and later ordered £20,000 in costs to Cepac.
However, the Tribunal never decided whether Page offered the interview, why the confirmation disappeared or whether disability affected the recruitment outcome. Nobody required Walker to reconcile her account with the same-day message. Nor did the hearing trace the health information recorded in paragraph 14.
A strike-out answers what happened procedurally. It does not transform an untested denial into a factual finding. Therefore, M&S’s reviewers should read the judgment alongside the evidence the judgment never determined.
Newcastle closed the case without opening the central package. Marks & Spencer’s procedure exists precisely because a responsible business should not outsource its supplier assessment to the label on somebody else’s fucking box.
Internal Audit And Risk Is Written Into The Ending
M&S’s procedure does not end with a buyer forwarding the complaint to Cepac and accepting whatever returns. It provides for dialogue, corrective actions, assigned monitoring responsibilities and third-party support. When the parties cannot agree, M&S reserves the right to determine its response with ESG and the colleagues responsible for human rights.
If somebody remains dissatisfied, ESG reviews the case with Internal Audit and Risk for a final decision. M&S may also identify customers with similar standards and share information, where appropriate, to create leverage and common expectations. Supplier conduct rarely affects one customer in isolation.
The PDF also names Thinus Keeve as Policy Owner and Karina O’Gorman as Compliance Lead. Consequently, this grievance need not circle Customer Services while M&S searches for somebody authorised to read it.
Consequently, M&S has already written the next steps. Establish the contractual route behind the two M&S displays. Obtain Page’s recruitment trail, Walker’s source material and the instructions supporting paragraph 14. Examine the medical-centre contact, the 191-page dossier and the costs campaign. Record findings, identify corrective action and explain who will monitor it.
Moreover, M&S’s 2026 Modern Slavery Statement says all GNFR supplier partners receive an invitation to complete an EcoVadis questionnaire and document-based assessment. New suppliers without a scorecard must participate, while identified improvements become monitored corrective-action plans. It also describes a procurement risk tool providing real-time alerts. Those systems should accept something more substantial than a supplier’s self-description.
The Marks & Spencer Cepac supplier grievance is now ready for the process M&S chose to publish. Internal Audit and Risk need not design anything. They only need to use it.
This Is Not Just Any Supplier Complaint
The sequence is compact enough for a receipt. Page offered an interview and discussed a wage. I disclosed that mental-health treatment explained my work gap. The confirmation disappeared. A same-day WhatsApp message preserved the offer. Maria Walker then supplied a no-interview account before she knew that receipt existed. Cepac’s ET3 later placed health information inside its recruitment story while distancing the company from disability knowledge.
Instead of taking those facts to a merits hearing, Cepac and Horsfield Menzies made my reactions the case. They investigated my medical-centre access, assembled a 191-page conduct dossier and ran combined costs beyond £50,000. Newcastle ended the proceedings without resolving the recruitment questions.
Meanwhile, M&S’s standards cover disability in hiring, grievance handling, intimidation, privacy, retaliation, investigation and remedy. Its May 2026 procedure even names the evidence, interviews, court proceedings, governance review and escalation that a serious assessment should include. Cepac supplied the three exhibits. Marks & Spencer supplied the fucking blueprint.
Therefore, establish who commissioned the displays, when the projects ran and which suppliers carried the work. Then run the procedure, publish an accountable outcome and decide whether Cepac belongs anywhere near the M&S brand.
This is not just any supplier complaint. It is the complaint M&S’s own rulebook seems to await.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cepac – POS Portfolio 2026, Page Three
- Marks & Spencer – Grievance Procedure For Supply Chains
- Marks & Spencer – Human Rights Policy, March 2026
- Marks & Spencer – Global Sourcing Principles
- Marks & Spencer – Modern Slavery Statement 2026
- Marks & Spencer – American Depositary Receipts
- TCAP – The Cepac Files : KFC II – Maria Walker And The Interview Receipt
- TCAP – 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.