Cepac wants credit for publishing equality paperwork. Unfortunately, the paperwork says its UK workforce is 86% male, women earn less on average, women receive lower bonuses, and women are barely visible in one of the better-paid bands. For a company already facing disability discrimination allegations, that is not equality culture. That is the corpse being wheeled through the dining room while management asks everyone to admire the tablecloth.
Cepac points to its gender pay gap report like it is evidence of progress.
Bad move.
Because the report does not clear Cepac. It exposes Cepac.
The company can wrap itself in the language of fairness, policy and future action, but the numbers do not read like a modern equality culture. They read like a workplace structure caught under fluorescent light with its trousers down.
This is not a side issue. Cepac is already facing disability discrimination allegations, and those allegations are now part of the company’s furniture because Cepac chose not to disprove them in daylight. Instead of letting the evidence be tested properly, it hired an aggressive legal team, pushed strike-out, inflated the file, leaned into costs pressure, and helped turn the person raising the allegation into the problem.
That tells us something about Cepac.
They make poor decisions.
Not just morally poor decisions. Commercially poor ones. Because a company that will not properly clear its name when facing disability discrimination allegations leaves those allegations sitting there, untested, public and attached. Then its customers inherit the question too.
The Equality Evidence Is The Body
Cepac’s annual gender pay gap report covers its four UK manufacturing sites at Darlington, Doncaster, Rawcliffe Bridge and Rotherham. The combined headcount is 449 people.
The split?
86% men.
14% women.
That is not a small imbalance. That is not a rounding error. That is not “we are on a journey”. That is a workplace culture publishing its own X-ray.
Cepac can call it manufacturing. Cepac can call it historical pattern. Cepac can call it pipeline. Fine. Every company with numbers this ugly has a laminated explanation ready. But the numbers are still the numbers, and the numbers look like a lads’ club with forklifts.
Men Earn More. Cepac Calls This Context.
The same report says women’s hourly rate is 10.7% lower than men on the mean and 7.9% lower on the median.
Cepac says it is confident men and women receive equal pay for doing the same or similar jobs. It also says gender pay gap reporting compares broad earnings across all men and women, regardless of role.
Fine.
Then call it what it is.
If Cepac says this is not an equal-pay problem, then it is a structure problem. A representation problem. A progression problem. A bonus problem. A culture problem. A “why are the better-paid routes still so male?” problem.
There is also the wider HSA Group shadow. Separate claims about HSA Group’s historic terrorism-funding links and conduct have been published by The Quiet Mancunian, and those claims sit outside this piece as allegations,ji not findings. But they matter here for one reason: they add to the question of corporate judgement. Cepac’s own numbers already show an 86% male workforce, women paid less on average, women receiving lower bonuses, and women barely visible in one of the better-paid bands. Nobody needs to reach for stereotypes. Cepac published the spreadsheet. The ownership context simply makes the question harder to ignore: what kind of culture is actually sitting behind this UK packaging business?
The Bonus Gap Does Not Help
The bonus figures are worse.
Cepac’s report says women’s bonus pay is 33.4% lower than men on the mean and 10.4% lower on the median. It also says 60.1% of men receive bonus pay compared with 50.8% of women.
Cepac’s explanation points to more men being in line manager and senior managerial roles, where there is more opportunity to earn higher bonuses.
Exactly.
That is not the rebuttal. That is the problem wearing a name badge.
If men are more likely to be in the roles that attract better bonuses, and men dominate the workforce, and women receive lower bonuses on average, then Cepac has not solved the equality question by explaining the mechanism. It has described the machinery.
Upper Middle, Lower Expectations
Then come the pay quartiles.
Women are 14.1% of the upper pay quartile.
Not good.
But the upper-middle quartile is worse: 92.4% men and 7.6% women.
Seven point six per cent.
That is not a glass ceiling. That is a locked service door.
Meanwhile, women are 21.5% of the lower quartile.
There it is. The shape of the thing. Men dominate the workforce. Men dominate the upper-middle band. Men receive bonuses more often. Men receive higher bonus pay. Women are more visible at the bottom than in one of the better-paid middle-upper layers.
Cepac can write whatever explanation it likes.
The spreadsheet already spoke.
Equality Garnish
Cepac lists its “recent and future actions”.
Supporting working parents. Family-leave guidelines. Enhanced maternity pay. Community outreach. A senior women’s forum. Leadership programmes. Women in senior roles.
Good.
Do those things.
But do not expect applause for owning a mop while the floor is still covered.
This is the problem with corporate equality paperwork. Too often it is treated as the achievement, rather than the receipt showing how far the company still has to go. Cepac’s equality story is not the existence of the report. The report exists because employers of this size are required to publish gender pay gap data.
The story is what the report says once the compliance box has been ticked.
And what it says is simple.
Men dominate. Women trail. Management explains.
Psychometric Testing? In This House?
One line in the report deserves its own raised eyebrow.
Cepac says it is introducing psychometric testing during recruitment and promotion assessments.
That might sound modern in a boardroom. In the real world, where Cepac is already facing disability discrimination allegations around recruitment, it needs hard scrutiny before anyone starts clapping.
Recruitment tools do not become fair because someone puts them in a PDF. They become fair when the employer can show they do not screen out disabled people, neurodivergent people, traumatised people, carers, older workers, awkward workers, or anyone else who does not perform neatly inside whatever corporate personality blender HR bought that year.
Cepac’s own numbers already raise questions about gender. The live dispute raises questions about disability. So when the answer is “psychometric testing”, the question is obvious.
Who gets filtered next?
The Ghost Cepac Chose
Cepac could have dealt with the disability discrimination allegations properly. It could have answered the claim, tested the evidence, cleared its name in daylight and moved on.
It chose the other route.
That is why the allegation now follows the company around like a ghost in the building. Not because an allegation is the same as a finding. It is not. But because Cepac chose not to have the thing properly tested. It chose procedural suppression over open examination.
That is not clearing your name. That is leaving the question alive.
And it gets worse, because once a company chooses that route, the damage spreads beyond the claimant and the tribunal file. Customers, procurement teams, brand owners and partners then have to ask what exactly they are dealing with. A safe supplier? A responsible employer? A business with proper judgement? Or a company willing to turn a discrimination allegation into a procedural knife fight rather than let the facts breathe?
A company that will not disprove disability discrimination allegations, and instead leaves them there untested, shows poor judgement.
Poor judgement is contagious.
The Court Helped The Mess Grow
The most ridiculous part is that the tribunal watched the scope expand and did nothing useful with it.
Protective measures were meant to protect a litigant in person. Instead, the process became the opposite. Cepac inflated the file, then the court treated the inflated file as claimant conduct. Orders were breached. Limits were mocked. Dates lapsed. The court refused to confront what was happening in front of it.
No content after a set date?
Then the date lapses.
Nothing.
Participation rules put in place to protect a disabled litigant in person?
Mocked.
Nothing.
Respondent conduct over more than a year?
Barely touched.
Claimant conduct arising in a health crisis?
Front and centre.
That is not neutral case management. That is a system choosing which mess to see.
Witness Intimidation By Blog Magic
Then came the witness-intimidation theatre.
A witness I do not know. Have never met. Still do not know. Couldn’t event tell you the cunt’s name without raking through files. Somebody who thinks they’re important enough to be written about though.
The existence of a blog was treated like intimidation.
That is how absurd the framing became. A blog exists, therefore a witness is apparently intimidated. Evidence concealed, orders breached, files inflated, protective measures undermined, and somehow the problem is still the claimant writing about what happened to him.
That tells you how the machine works. It does not need the allegation to make sense. It only needs the label.
The Claimant Became The Villain
Cepac chose not to clear its name. It chose to build a conduct file. It chose to escalate. It chose to push. It chose to make the disabled litigant in person look like the problem.
And the court let that framing harden.
Respondent disregard for orders?
Excused, ignored or absorbed into the wallpaper.
Claimant reactions arising from disability, stress and health crisis?
Treated like evidence of unreasonableness.
The court even managed its own little discriminatory slip when it gender-framed the judge I told to fuck off, despite no gender reveal party taking place when the outburst happened during a health crisis.
That is the kind of detail that tells you where the mind of the process had gone. Not conduct in context. Not disability in context. Not health crisis in context.
Just a claimant to discipline. And a case purposely and strategically driven off of the road and court too stupid – or willing – to allow it.
Smith Wrote It. James Echoed It.
A company whose customers now have a simpler question to answer.
After Smith sent a prejudiced letter before the hearing, Judge James could not even be arsed to use meaningfully different language. No visible interest in the optics. No serious attempt to make the process look unbiased. Just the same framing sliding from respondent letter into judicial treatment like everyone had already agreed who the villain was supposed to be. Copy and pasting a problematic pre-hearing letter that let the cat out the bag. Newcastle Employment Tribunal, ladies and gentleman.
That matters for customers because this is not just a private legal spat anymore. This is about judgement. Cepac’s judgement. Its lawyers’ judgement. The court’s judgement. And the commercial judgement of every company still happy to sit next to Cepac while pretending none of this touches them.
Equality Packaging
This is the Cepac problem in miniature.
The company knows how to package. It packages cardboard. It packages compliance. It packages explanations. It packages the gender pay gap as progress.
But sometimes the box splits open.
And inside?
An 86% male workforce. Women earning less on average. Women receiving lower bonuses. Women less likely to receive bonuses. Women nearly invisible in the upper-middle pay band. A disability discrimination dispute running alongside it. A corporate website much more comfortable selling sustainability and packaging than showing serious equality, disability inclusion or recruitment fairness architecture.
That is not equality culture.
That is equality garnish.
A diversity paragraph stapled to a workplace structure that still favours men.
The Procurement Question
So ask yourselves this, procurement teams.
Are Cepac a safe pick?
A safe pair of hands to carry your business, your packaging, your supply chain and your reputation?
Or are they reckless, discriminatory and far too comfortable hiding behind process when challenged?
Because once you know the allegation exists, once you know Cepac chose not to clear its name in daylight, and once you know how this company chose to treat the person raising it, the question changes.
It is no longer just “can Cepac supply us?”
It is:
Do you want your brand associated with them?
The Corpse Is The Receipt
Cepac wants to point at its gender pay report as evidence that it is working on equality.
But the report is not just the defence.
It is the receipt.
It is like parading the body through the room and then pleading innocence because the paperwork was filed on time.
Nobody needs to stereotype Cepac. Nobody needs to guess what the culture looks like. Cepac published the numbers.
And once a company publishes numbers like that, the question is no longer whether the equality corpse exists.
The question is who carried it in.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project