Simon Horsfield Investigations : The Torch Points One Way

TCAP has a NEW Horsfield Menzies series coming.

HM Histories will open a different drawer. Blog vs Behaviour, however, is not being retired when it launches; the two will run concurrently, because Horsfield Menzies has accidentally created far too rich an archive to abandon. One series can look backwards. The other will keep doing what has become an extremely productive exercise: taking the firm’s own professional advice, placing it beside the record and watching the temperature rise.

Simon Horsfield has supplied a particularly good reason to keep the old machine running.

He has written about whistleblowing investigations. He has hosted professional investigators discussing lessons from the Post Office Horizon scandal. His firm later built an entire Workplace Investigations Unit. Most helpfully of all, Simon has publicly warned that solicitors themselves “don’t always make the best investigators”.

Then a serious complaint about one of his own solicitors landed directly in his inbox.

Suddenly, the investigation masterclass became a considerably quieter fucking room.

Simon Horsfield Knows What An Investigation Looks Like

Horsfield’s article “Whistle-Blowing Increases In Volume” contains no ambiguity about the basic job. “Complaints should be investigated promptly”, he says. An investigator or investigation team should be appointed, preferably people properly trained for the work or suitably qualified outsiders. He even makes the unusually candid observation that barristers and solicitors are often appointed to investigate but may not be particularly good at it because investigation requires its own techniques.

That is excellent advice. More importantly, Simon does not describe investigation as a hunt for enough material to justify the answer management already prefers. He recommends separating the exercise into stages: first establish whether evidence of the alleged wrongdoing exists, without immediately becoming preoccupied with individual culpability; only after that, where necessary, move on to who was responsible and what should happen.

There is another subtle point in his guidance. Sometimes the person reporting wrongdoing has misunderstood what happened or is motivated by a grievance. Fine. Meet them. Put the concern into context. Explain the facts. In other words, do not simply stamp DIFFICULT COMPLAINANT on the file and congratulate yourself on having investigated the problem.

This is not TCAP reverse-engineering some lofty ethical standard from Simon’s job title.

He wrote the bastard checklist.

There Was Even A Post Office Seminar

Simon did not leave his interest in investigations on the blog.

Horsfield Menzies later hosted an HR Matters event in London featuring investigation specialists Intersol Global. The programme included lessons from failures exposed by the Post Office Horizon scandal, with Simon discussing investigative techniques with Intersol managing director Mick Confrey. Horsfield Menzies’ own review records the conversation alongside the firm’s employment-law panel.

The setting was considerably nicer than most evidence rooms. Pall Mall. Institute of Directors. Champagne and canapés afterwards. A DJ. The institutional wreckage of one of Britain’s most notorious miscarriages of justice converted, as these things inevitably are, into an evening of useful professional learning with drinks.

There is nothing wrong with that. The Horizon scandal has supplied organisations with exceptionally serious lessons about evidence, tunnel vision, disclosure, institutional defensiveness and the catastrophic consequences of treating the person challenging the system as the problem.

What matters is that Simon Horsfield was not some employment solicitor who had never encountered those ideas.

He was hosting the fucking conversation.

Then The Torch Swung Towards Horsfield Menzies

On 23 March 2025, I sent a detailed complaint about Horsfield Menzies Senior Associate Sam Butler directly to Angus Menzies, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin. It did not drift into an anonymous customer-service mailbox. The people controlling the firm received it themselves.

The complaint concerned matters I regarded as serious: disability-related medical information, the firm’s contact involving my medical centre, disputed statements during the litigation, aggressive costs pressure and the handling of correspondence in an already hostile disability-discrimination case. The following day, I asked for the ordinary machinery Simon himself recommends when writing for other organisations: acknowledge the complaint, tell me whether it would be investigated and indicate when I could expect an outcome.

There was some response to the allegations, but nothing resembling a communicated investigation architecture. No independent investigator was identified to me. No scope was set out. No evidence-assessment process was explained. No findings document arrived and no reasoned investigation outcome was communicated.

That matters more after reading Simon.

Because one of the people receiving my complaint was the man who had publicly explained why organisations should appoint properly trained investigators and had specifically warned that solicitors may not always be the best people to investigate.

Simon knew the solution to the conflict before the conflict arrived.

Appoint somebody else.

The Allegation Was Not The Verdict

TCAP does not need the complaint to have been automatically correct for this argument to work. Quite the opposite.

A complaint is an allegation.

That is why you investigate the bastard thing.

Perhaps Butler had behaved impeccably. Perhaps I had misunderstood the medical-centre contact. Maybe the use of health-related information was entirely proper, the costs correspondence completely justified and every disputed statement defensible from the underlying file. A competent independent investigation could have reached those conclusions and handed Horsfield Menzies a useful answer.

Simon had already explained how.

Establish whether there is evidence of wrongdoing before leaping to culpability. Use someone trained. Put the complainant’s concerns into context. Gather the relevant evidence before delay destroys or degrades it. Then reach findings.

That process protects the accused solicitor as much as the complainant.

Instead, from my side of the desk, the investigation mechanism disappeared behind the building. Whatever Horsfield Menzies may have thought internally, I did not receive the structured findings, evidential reasoning or identifiable review Simon tells other organisations to build.

The complaint went in carrying names, dates and allegations.

The torch did not appear to follow it very far.

Then Horsfield Menzies Found The Batteries

This would be considerably less interesting if Horsfield Menzies had simply proved itself institutionally incapable of detailed evidential work.

It did not.

When my conduct became useful to Cepac’s strike-out case, the appetite for collection was extraordinary. My communications were gathered. Blog material was gathered. X posts were gathered. Tribunal history was examined. Correspondence was indexed and events were turned into chronology.

Two dedicated strike-out evidence collections alone ran across 191 pages of the combined hearing bundle. The wider bundle reached 1,657 pages excluding the index. The eventual judgment records extensive reliance on communications, public commentary and social-media material when considering the manner in which I had conducted the proceedings.

That work required time, selection and professional attention. Somebody had to find the material, decide it mattered, organise it, preserve it and build an argument from it.

Apparently Horsfield Menzies did not suffer from an investigation-skills deficit.

It had a fucking directional setting.

The Medical Centre Demonstrates The Difference

The medical-centre episode makes that direction particularly difficult to ignore.

When a medical appointment became relevant to my postponement request, Horsfield Menzies contacted the medical centre and obtained information about alternative appointment availability. Butler then relied on that information in arguing that moving my medical appointment would be more expedient than moving the hearing.

Whatever view anyone takes of the propriety of that contact, the investigative instinct is unmistakable. A factual uncertainty existed. Horsfield Menzies identified somebody who could answer it, made the enquiry, acquired useful information and deployed the result.

That is active curiosity.

My later complaint specifically raised the firm’s handling of medical information and the medical-centre contact. Now curiosity would have required something more awkward: looking backwards through its own conduct rather than outward at the disabled opponent.

The contrast is almost offensively neat.

When Horsfield Menzies wanted information from my medical provider, somebody found the number.

When I asked Horsfield Menzies to investigate its own solicitor’s conduct surrounding that episode, no comparable investigative product ever found its way back to me.

Simon had written about the importance of prompt investigation.

The promptness appears to have depended rather heavily on which direction the fucking torch was pointing.

Horizon Without The Canapés

This is where Simon’s Post Office interest becomes more than decorative irony.

One of the ugliest institutional lessons from Horizon is not simply that bad evidence can exist. It is that organisations can become intensely curious about evidence incriminating the person challenging them while remaining strangely resistant to evidence threatening their own settled understanding.

The dissenter becomes suspicious.

The institution becomes the baseline.

Every angry reaction confirms that the awkward person is awkward. Every new complaint becomes evidence that the complainant complains too much. The organisation’s own behaviour recedes into context while the individual’s response becomes the event requiring explanation.

I am not equating an employment dispute with the Post Office scandal. That would be ridiculous and unnecessary.

The investigative pathology is the interesting part.

Simon chose Horizon as a source of lessons about investigations. Therefore he plainly understands the danger of institutions becoming too comfortable with their own narrative. Yet in my case, the evidential enthusiasm visible from outside became vastly more impressive when Horsfield Menzies was examining me than when I asked its owners to examine Horsfield Menzies.

The venue changed.

The lesson should not have.

Find The Wrongdoing Before You Find The Villain

The most useful part of Simon’s guidance may be his two-stage approach.

First ask whether there is evidence that the alleged wrongdoing happened.

Only afterwards, where necessary, turn towards individual responsibility.

That sequence is intellectually healthy because it resists one of the oldest investigative failures available: deciding first whether you like or believe the complainant and allowing that judgment to settle whether the underlying event needs examination.

My litigation eventually travelled almost perfectly in the opposite narrative direction.

The claimant became fascinating.

My emails mattered. My language mattered. TCAP mattered. X mattered. My complaints mattered. Previous litigation mattered. My reactions to procedural decisions mattered. A substantial documentary case formed around my behaviour until the conduct case became capable of ending the discrimination proceedings themselves.

The person became easier to investigate than the allegation.

That is precisely why Simon’s sequencing matters. Start with the alleged wrongdoing. Establish what happened. Resist turning the complainant into the first and most convenient subject merely because their conduct later becomes noisier than the original event.

Horsfield Menzies knows the theory.

Simon wrote it before his own firm became the fucking practical.

Context, According To Simon

His article contains another small grenade.

Where a whistleblower has misunderstood something or the concern may be driven by personal grievance, Simon recommends meeting them and putting matters into context. That is sensible because people can be wrong without being dishonest, emotional without being irrational and personally invested without the underlying concern becoming imaginary.

Context does not automatically vindicate them.

It stops investigators becoming stupid.

That principle was acutely relevant to my case because Horsfield Menzies possessed medical evidence describing anxiety, depression and difficulty regulating emotions under stress. The Tribunal later rejected my argument that disability justified the sustained conduct it condemned, and that finding is part of the record. Nevertheless, the underlying medical context existed and was known.

As the dispute escalated, my reactions became progressively more useful as conduct evidence.

Simon had already written the cure for simplistic interpretation: put the concern into context.

Yet the respondent’s evidential case derived enormous value from extracting communications as discrete examples of conduct. The email is rude. The post is aggressive. The complaint is excessive. Each can be perfectly genuine evidence while still becoming misleading if the only question asked is what the words look like after the surrounding human context has been stripped away.

Again, this is not about excusing everything.

It is about investigating intelligently.

Simon says that too.

The Torch Is Not Neutral Merely Because It Is Bright

There is a mistake institutions make when they confuse the quantity of evidence with the quality of enquiry.

A thousand pages do not prove curiosity if all thousand face the same direction.

You can conduct exhaustive searches, preserve screenshots, construct chronologies, interrogate correspondence and still fail the more fundamental investigative test: did anyone seriously look for material capable of proving the organisation itself wrong?

That is where Simon’s advice cuts deeper than Horsfield Menzies probably intended.

The firm demonstrated immense capacity to scrutinise. The question is not whether it could investigate.

It plainly fucking could.

The question is why the visible forensic intensity differed so dramatically depending on the object of scrutiny.

My complaint about Butler did not need to be upheld. It needed an investigation capable of explaining why it was upheld or rejected.

By contrast, the case against my conduct received collection, organisation, argument and ultimately judgment.

One beam illuminated the room.

The other appears to have stopped at the firm’s own shoes.

Simon Horsfield Was Not A Bystander

This matters particularly because the complaint went to Simon himself.

He was not a distant commentator whose article happened to age badly after somebody elsewhere in the organisation made an unfortunate decision. His surname is on the firm. He received the complaint directly. He had the authority to recognise the obvious conflict and commission the kind of independent review his own professional writing recommends.

He also had access to external investigative expertise. Horsfield Menzies had publicly worked with Intersol Global. Simon had sat down with its managing director to discuss investigation techniques and institutional failures. There was no conceptual obstacle to saying: this complaint concerns one of our own lawyers, therefore somebody sufficiently independent should examine it.

That would not have admitted wrongdoing.

It would have demonstrated confidence.

Instead, the complainant received no identified independent investigation, no communicated scope and no findings capable of being tested against the allegations.

That is not a problem Simon can solve by writing another article.

He already wrote the fucking answer.

The Torch Only Points One Way

This is why Blog vs Behaviour survives the launch of HM Histories.

The new series will have its own lane. Blog vs Behaviour will keep running beside it because Horsfield Menzies remains an astonishingly generous source of standards against which to measure Horsfield Menzies.

Simon Horsfield advises employers to investigate complaints promptly. He says trained investigators should be appointed. He warns that solicitors themselves are not always the best investigators. He recommends separating the question of whether wrongdoing occurred from the later question of who is responsible, and he recognises the importance of context when evaluating the person raising concerns.

Then a complaint about his own firm’s Senior Associate arrived in Simon Horsfield’s inbox.

No structured investigation outcome was communicated to me.

Meanwhile, Horsfield Menzies proved itself capable of formidable evidential curiosity when the subject was the disabled complainant on the other side of the litigation. It contacted my medical centre when a factual answer could assist its position. It helped gather communications, blogs and X material into dedicated strike-out evidence. It participated in turning the claimant’s conduct into the issue which ultimately reached judgment while the underlying discrimination merits did not.

So this is not an article accusing Horsfield Menzies of failing to understand investigations.

That would let them off too easily.

The firm understands investigations very fucking well.

Simon Horsfield has written the guidance, hosted the experts and even warned that lawyers sometimes make lousy investigators.

The problem is simpler.

Horsfield Menzies had a torch.

It worked beautifully.

It only seemed to point one fucking way.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour – SIMON HORSFIELD – THE TORCH ONLY POINTS ONE FUCKING WAY