Cepac Darlington Strike : £53m For Rotherham, Closure For Darlington

Cepac has a clean explanation for the proposed closure of its Darlington factory. Flutepac did not grow as quickly as management expected, the site accumulated heavy financial losses and, regrettably, up to 63 jobs are now at risk while the company consults on ending production.

It is a wonderfully tidy story. Unfortunately, it begins about three years too late.

Before Flutepac supposedly disappointed anybody, more than 90 workers at Darlington had fought Cepac over pay and conditions. Before the company started talking about slower market development, it had already blamed those workers for lost orders, suspended investment, threatened redundancies and said industrial action had changed the direction of the factory. Unite was calling the threats to cut jobs ‘vindictive’ while the dispute was still happening.

Then Cepac spent the following years deciding where its money, capacity and confidence would go. Rotherham eventually received a £53 million expansion intended to double the headquarters operation, while Darlington went from ‘promising future’, to Flutepac investment, to ‘hidden jewel’, to permanent management recruitment, to proposed closure.

So no, I am not swallowing a fucking cardboard tray and pretending Flutepac explains the whole thing.

The Trouble Started When Darlington Said No

The 2023 dispute concerned much more than an ordinary annual conversation about wages. Unite said Cepac’s eight per cent headline offer came attached to longer hours, reduced overtime rates, changes to shift patterns and worse sick-pay arrangements. Cepac disputed that characterisation, arguing that the package was generous and that changes were necessary to secure the future of a loss-making operation.

More than 90 workers decided they were not having it. Industrial action escalated into weeks of strikes and the company’s language changed with it, increasingly stressing the effect upon customers, orders, investment and ultimately jobs. There is nothing remarkable about a company arguing against a union’s pay claim, just as there is nothing remarkable about workers withdrawing their labour when negotiations fail. What interests me is how quickly the consequences of management’s disagreement with its workforce were presented as consequences created by the workforce itself.

A strike is supposed to create economic pressure. Without disruption it would be little more than an organised day off with placards. Yet as soon as Darlington workers successfully exerted that pressure, Cepac began turning the damage back on them: orders were being lost, customers were at risk, investment was threatened and colleagues could lose their jobs. Suddenly the people with the least control over Cepac’s long-term corporate strategy were being presented as a threat to the future of the factory.

Convenient.

Unite Called It Vindictive Before I Ever Met Cepac

I have called Cepac nasty and vindictive often enough that somebody could dismiss the description as the language of a man who later ended up fighting the company himself. There is just one problem with that defence: Unite beat me to it by a year.

Its September 2023 coverage of the Darlington dispute carried the line ‘Cepac facing legal action over vindictive job cuts’. Sharon Graham described Cepac’s actions as ‘despicable’ and said the company should be ‘thoroughly ashamed of themselves’. Regional Officer Pat McCourt argued that the disruption was ‘entirely of the company’s own making’, saying Cepac preferred threatening workers’ jobs to reaching a fair agreement.

A fortnight later, Unite’s language had hardened further. Its account accused Cepac of threatening 61 redundancies, fire and rehire on inferior contracts and unlawful inducements during collective bargaining. Sharon Graham called the company’s approach ‘bullyboy tactics’, while Unite pointed to Cepac’s 2022 gross profit of £38.6 million and the remuneration of its highest-paid director.

That was September 2023. I had never applied to Cepac, never dealt with its HR department, never sued it and never written about it. Apparently I was simply late to the fucking meeting.

Cepac Said The Strike Changed Darlington

The strongest reason for refusing to treat 2023 as ancient history comes from Cepac itself. On 24 August 2023, the company said the strike had reduced orders and put future orders at serious risk. It began redundancy consultation involving up to 61 jobs and announced that previously agreed investment plans for Darlington had been placed on hold.

Cepac did not stop there. Steve Moss said the company planned to restructure the site, reduce its requirement for complex print and focus more heavily on sustainable packaging technologies. Existing print customers could be transitioned to other parts of Cepac or even to alternative suppliers where necessary.

Most importantly, Moss said the ‘withdrawal of production during the 6 weeks of strike action’ represented too great a risk to reinvest in printed products. Cepac expressly described the accelerated transition of the site as a consequence of Unite’s actions. That is not TCAP joining unrelated dots three years later. Cepac drew the fucking line itself.

Management said the strike had altered the investment calculation, customers might move elsewhere, the shape of the business would change and the factory would accelerate towards a different future. If Cepac now wants everybody to begin Darlington’s closure story with disappointing Flutepac sales in 2026, it first needs us to forget what Cepac was saying in 2023. I haven’t.

Flutepac Was Part Of The Post-Strike Future

The obvious answer from Cepac would be that it continued investing in Darlington after the industrial dispute. That is true, but it does not erase the chronology. In some respects, it reinforces it.

By July 2024, Cepac was promoting additional corrugating capacity and new equipment specifically for Flutepac as part of a wider £20 million investment programme. Darlington was being repositioned around direct-food-contact fibre packaging, with management talking enthusiastically about sustainable alternatives to plastic and the ability to manufacture the entire product under one roof.

That fits remarkably well with the transformation Cepac had described during the strike. Management had already said it no longer wanted to take the risk of reinvesting in traditional printed products and intended to push Darlington further towards sustainable packaging formats. Flutepac was not some completely separate chapter that magically erased the industrial dispute; it became a substantial part of what came next.

The important point is not that Cepac invested after the strike and therefore everything must have been forgiven. Management controlled the post-strike transformation, selected the products on which Darlington’s future would depend and decided how much capital should support them. If that new strategy subsequently went to shit, the workforce did not design it.

The Hidden Jewel That Apparently Turned To Shit

Nor did Cepac spend 2024 and 2025 warning everybody that Flutepac was staggering towards disaster. Its July 2024 announcement was enthusiastic. Steve Moss said the additional microflute corrugator capacity created new opportunities and enhanced production capabilities for Darlington, while Group Sales Director Chris Ford described Flutepac as quickly establishing itself as a premier cardboard packaging solution.

By November 2025, Cepac sounded even happier. Its ‘All under one roof!’ article celebrated the £53 million Rotherham project before turning to what the company called a ‘hidden jewel’ within the group: Darlington’s paper-based direct-food-contact operation. Cepac boasted about the integrated manufacturing process and said its capability put the company ‘in a class of our own’.

Then came December. Cepac advertised for a permanent Production Manager to join the Darlington senior leadership team, run profitable production, identify capital-investment opportunities and help ‘shape the future of our Darlington site’. Nine months later, the company announced that the future might be no Darlington site at all.

That is a fairly spectacular journey from hidden jewel to heavy losses.

Meanwhile, Rotherham Got £53 Million

By the time Cepac described Darlington as that hidden jewel in November 2025, the wider strategic direction of the company was already becoming difficult to miss. In September, Cepac had formally announced Rotherham 2, a 36-month programme with more than £53 million earmarked for infrastructure, equipment and new jobs. The scheme includes additional factory space and advanced machinery, with the company describing a project intended to double the size of its Rotherham headquarters operation.

Darlington and Rotherham do different work. I know. That observation does not make the comparison irrelevant, because this is not an argument about physically moving one machine from County Durham to South Yorkshire. Capital allocation tells you where management sees the future.

One operation received a transformational investment programme measured in tens of millions of pounds. Another operation, whose workforce had fought management two years earlier, was still being publicly praised but would shortly find itself facing extinction. Markets influence those decisions, obviously, but they do not make them. Directors decide where the company accepts risk, where capacity will increase, which markets deserve backing and where the business wants to be in five or ten years.

Darlington’s workers did not allocate £53 million to Rotherham. The people upstairs did.

And Yes, Upstairs Is Still Very Male

There is a small cultural detail worth leaving here because TCAP has already covered it at length and there is no need to repeat the whole sermon. Cepac’s current boardroom is all male and, seemingly, populated by pieces of fucking shit too.

This is the same company capable of producing polished material about women in packaging and corporate values while the statutory centre of power remains resolutely bloke-shaped. The contradiction does not prove anything about the Darlington closure, but it does tell me how much weight to place on the glossy corporate language about everybody having a voice.

The workers can have values statements and women can have initiatives and awards, while the actual power remains concentrated somewhere rather less diverse. Somebody still has to decide where £53 million goes and which factory gets a redundancy consultation.

Funny old pyramid.

Do Not Blame A Fucking Punnet

Cepac’s September 2026 explanation says the accelerated growth planned for Flutepac ‘has not materialised due to much slower market development than we had anticipated’. That may be entirely accurate as a description of Flutepac’s performance, but it does not follow that it explains the whole history of Darlington.

The workforce did not forecast that accelerated growth. Employees on the factory floor did not select Flutepac as the commercial future, approve its equipment, determine the necessary utilisation rate or decide how heavily the site should depend upon the product. Those were management judgements made after a bitter industrial dispute in which Cepac had already said the strike was changing investment and customer decisions.

If Flutepac turned out to be the wrong bet, that is interesting because it means the executives who selected the post-strike strategy appear to have selected one that could not carry the factory three years later. Calling that ‘slower market development’ does not transfer responsibility downwards. It merely provides the name of the thing management apparently got wrong.

This Is Why I Call Bullshit

The chronology is brutally simple when the corporate press releases are read together instead of separately. In 2023, workers challenged Cepac. Management blamed the strike for commercial damage, put investment on hold, contemplated moving customer work elsewhere and said the dispute was forcing an accelerated restructuring of Darlington. Unite called the resulting job cut threats vindictive and the company’s behaviour despicable.

During 2024, Cepac invested in the transformed operation and presented Flutepac as an exciting future. By 2025, management was calling Darlington a hidden jewel and recruiting permanent senior leadership while simultaneously committing £53 million to an expansion intended to double Rotherham. Now, in 2026, Darlington faces closure.

Cepac would apparently prefer the public to look only at the final step: Flutepac growth disappointed, losses followed, regrettable decision, terribly sorry. I am looking at the whole fucking staircase, and what I see is a workforce that challenged management, a company that openly said the challenge changed its investment decisions, a subsequent redirection of the factory, enormous strategic investment elsewhere and eventual closure of the troublesome site.

To me, that looks vindictive as fuck. Apparently Unite thought so before I did.

Then I Got My Own Introduction To Cepac

My own experience arrived in August 2024, almost a year after Unite had already started using that language. Page Outsourcing contacted me about a production job at Cepac Darlington, offered an interview after the bank holiday and discussed a £27,000 training wage moving towards £29,000. During that conversation I disclosed the mental-health-related reason for the gap in my employment history, and I was told that the precise interview arrangements would follow.

They did not, but fortunately I had messaged somebody immediately after the call. The contemporaneous WhatsApp records ‘Interview next week’ and the wage conversation at a point when there was no complaint, no ACAS notification, no Tribunal claim and certainly no TCAP campaign against Cepac.

When I later challenged what had happened, HR Business Partner Maria Walker told me that my CV had been submitted with others but that I had ‘not been shortlisted on that occasion’. She supplied that explanation before knowing the contemporaneous WhatsApp existed.

I regard her account as false.

Challenge Cepac And Somehow You Become The Problem

What followed is one reason the Darlington dispute now looks so familiar to me. A simple factual conflict about recruitment should have been capable of determination through evidence. Instead, by the end of the litigation, enormous attention had shifted onto my emails, language, blogging and alleged effect upon others.

Peter Grey became Cepac’s key proposed substantive witness, too intimidated because TCAP exists, despite my never having met him, spoken to him, written to him or targeted him before Cepac introduced him into the proceedings. My claim was eventually struck out without the recruitment dispute receiving a merits determination, so Walker’s account was never tested in the merits hearing I had sought.

The workers’ dispute and mine are not legally the same thing, but what interests me is the corporate reflex. Darlington workers exercised collective power and were blamed for harming the company; I challenged recruitment treatment and eventually found myself becoming a substantial part of the case instead.

Challenge Cepac and somehow the challenger becomes the problem. That is what I mean by bullying downwards.

Rights Are Lovely Until Somebody Uses Them

Corporate values are wonderfully cheap things to print. Equality, collaboration, respect, employee engagement and integrity fit beautifully beside photographs of smiling workers and new machinery. The useful test comes when somebody expects them to cost the company something.

Darlington workers expected their collective rights to mean they could reject terms they considered unacceptable and strike. I expected equality law to mean I could challenge what I believed happened after disclosing my health history. Neither group quietly accepted Cepac’s preferred position, and that is where the values become interesting.

Rights are apparently wonderful while they remain theoretical. Once somebody lower down the hierarchy actually uses one against the institution, the temperature changes rapidly and the person exercising it starts attracting rather more attention than the underlying complaint.

Failure Travels Downhill

There is another reason I will not accept the closure story being detached from management accountability. When a corporate investment works, executives receive the language of leadership. Strategy was visionary, capital allocation was intelligent, management identified the opportunity and somebody poses beside a new machine for the company website.

When the forecast fails badly enough to threaten an entire factory, the consequences take a remarkably different route. Up to 63 employees at Darlington now face uncertainty because Cepac says the market did not develop as management anticipated. Those people did not make the anticipation, approve the strategy that depended upon it or decide whether Darlington received another £50 million or a consultation letter.

Yet workers carry the physical consequence of the error while the people who made the decisions remain upstairs explaining that market conditions were difficult. Corporate accountability has a funny sense of gravity.

The Strikers Did Not Do This To Darlington

That point needs stating plainly because Cepac spent so much of 2023 linking industrial action to the threat hanging over the plant. The strikers did not decide Darlington’s post-dispute product strategy, choose which customers remained there, determine where future group capacity would sit or decide how much investment Rotherham deserved.

Cepac did all of that.

If Flutepac genuinely failed because the market developed too slowly, then management backed a strategy that failed. If Darlington’s wider position was weakened because customer work and investment moved following the strike, Cepac had already publicly described those decisions while blaming the dispute.

Either way, treating the people on the factory floor as the authors of Darlington’s fate is bullshit. They exercised their rights; management ran the fucking company.

Darlington: Tell TCAP What Happened

The people who worked inside the factory will know far more about this chronology than any press release can tell me. Current employees, former employees, union members, agency workers, contractors and managers will have seen when orders changed, when particular work moved, how Flutepac actually performed and what management was saying long before the proposed closure became public.

If you were at Darlington during the 2023 dispute, remained through the restructuring or watched the Flutepac strategy develop, I want to hear from you. I am particularly interested in what happened to customers and equipment after the strike, whether work moved elsewhere within Cepac, how investment decisions were explained internally and whether the treatment of people prominently involved in the dispute changed afterwards.

Documents are especially useful. Emails, internal presentations, meeting notes, consultation papers, production information and contemporaneous messages can turn somebody’s recollection into something much harder for a company to dismiss.

Cepac has already published its version of Darlington. TCAP would quite like the factory’s.

Cardboard Factories. Plastic Values.

Three years ago, Darlington workers told Cepac no. The company’s response was to blame their industrial action for lost business, put investment on hold, threaten jobs and explicitly alter the strategic direction of the site. Unite watched it happening and described the resulting cuts as vindictive.

Management then controlled everything that followed. Cepac chose the post-strike strategy, backed Flutepac, celebrated Darlington as a hidden jewel, recruited someone to shape its future and found £53 million for a programme intended to double Rotherham.

Now the company says Flutepac failed to grow quickly enough and Darlington may have to close. I call bullshit on the idea that this is merely an unfortunate packaging-market story. The final commercial problem may well be real, but it sits at the end of a chronology in which Cepac had already turned on this workforce when it fought back and had already said that resistance changed the company’s investment decisions.

So spare me the values page, ‘Together we achieve more’ and the corporate lectures about collaboration from an all-male boardroom while workers beneath it discover how expensive saying no can become. If that is the terrain Cepac wants to operate on, take the cardboard factories and the plastic fucking values with you.

Darlington’s workers did not devise this strategy, allocate the capital or make the forecasts that supposedly killed their factory.

The nasty vindictive bastards in charge did.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

The Cepac Files : Darlington – Don’t Blame Flutepac, Follow The Fucking Chronology