7th November 2025
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire SK9 5AF
To: The Information Commissioner’s Office
Subject: Misuse of “vexatious” designation by Stockport Council to suppress genuine public concerns
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to raise a formal concern about Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council’s repeated and improper use of the term “vexatious” to block legitimate public enquiries under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Environmental Information Regulations.
This particular experience relates to the construction and operation of Vale View Primary School, which opened in 2011. From the outset, local residents, the police, and I raised serious and evidence-based concerns about the safety of the school’s traffic arrangements — including inadequate access roads, unsafe drop-off points, and poor visibility. These concerns were later echoed by officers within Greater Manchester Police shortly after the school opened.
Rather than engaging constructively with these concerns, the Council labelled my attempts to obtain information about the school’s planning, highways assessments, and safety audits as vexatious. This effectively shut down public scrutiny of decisions that had clear implications for child safety and community wellbeing.
The same pattern of behaviour extended to my efforts to raise legitimate environmental and public health concerns about the school site itself. Despite knowing the Vale View Primary School site was contaminated — as evidenced by three planning applications refused in 1974 on contamination grounds — Stockport Council initially sought to avoid carrying out any proper contamination investigations. Local residents, familiar with the land’s hazardous history, objected strongly. The Council’s first investigation consisted of a single borehole, which even one of its own contamination officers criticised as wholly inadequate. A subsequent investigation was commissioned but deliberately excluded the precise area where the school buildings would be located, which was directly over the infilled rubbish clay pits, on the stated grounds of not wanting to disturb the football pitch. Councillor Mark Weldon later asserted that the investigations complied with the relevant British Standard, but this was incorrect: that standard requires consistent grid-pattern sampling, which did not occur. Concerned by the Council’s handling of the matter, I visited the Environment Agency offices in Warrington and provided them with evidence of the contamination. The Agency accepted my concerns as credible and advised Stockport Council not to proceed with the application due to contamination risk. The Council ignored that advice. When I later asked whether the additional contamination investigations required by the Environment Agency had been completed, my questions were labelled “vexatious” — yet those investigations had, in fact, not been done. Local residents also claimed four public footpaths crossing the site, forcing the Council to apply for their diversion. I objected to the diversion, arguing that paths might be rerouted through contaminated land. For that footpath diversion inquiry — and that inquiry alone — the entire site was finally tested and found to contain lead, arsenic, and brown asbestos. Although remediation was then attempted, the process was deeply flawed: contaminated soil was improperly stockpiled, and brown asbestos fibres were left in place. Video evidence submitted at the time showed asbestos being left on site, but either enforcement officer Dave Westwood was never given this information, due to the Council’s practice of filtering correspondence, or he failed to act upon it.
The term vexatious is intended to protect public authorities from genuinely harassing or manifestly unreasonable correspondence. However, in this case, it appears to have been used as a tool to silence reasonable questions and to deter residents from pursuing transparency about matters of genuine public interest.
I have always conducted my correspondence courteously and with the sole purpose of ensuring children’s safety and environmental protection. I lost my own child in a road accident many years ago, and I have since dedicated my time to advocating for safer roads and responsible land use. My motivation is entirely one of public safety, not personal grievance.
I therefore believe Stockport Council’s actions may amount to an abuse of Section 14(1) of the Freedom of Information Act, and I respectfully ask the Information Commissioner to review their use of this designation in my case.
In particular, I request that the ICO:
- Review the Council’s decision to apply the “vexatious” label to my information requests regarding Vale View Primary School.
- Consider whether this label has been used as a means to suppress legitimate public interest scrutiny.
- Provide guidance or enforcement action if necessary to ensure that Stockport Council handles future FOI/EIR requests lawfully and fairly.
I am happy to provide copies of correspondence, requests, and responses that demonstrate this pattern of behaviour, as well as supporting evidence relating to the contamination investigations and the Environment Agency’s intervention.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to your response.
Yours faithfully,
Sheila Oliver
Editor, The Romiley Gazette
Sheila Oliver
Editor, The Romiley Gazette
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/bill-for-school-to-be-built-on-toxic-minefield-898373
At Harcourt Street, North Reddish, Stockport local people had a much-loved playing field and green lung. People used to meet there for a chat and if someone elderly hadn’t been seen for a while, neighbours would call on them to make sure they were OK. It was very valuable to them.
Although the Council was fully aware the land was contaminated, as were local people – the Council had refused three planning permissions in 1974 for that reason – they pretended it wasn’t contaminated. (Removal of contamination is very, very expensive if it is done safely and properly).
It was in the Council’s town plan for both public open space and the site for the replacement of one junior school only – North Reddish Juniors – yet Stockport Council decided to build its mega-shed, prison-style replacement for the three much-loved schools which were to be closed. Local people should have been given the option (which would have been much cheaper) to renovate the existing schools. They weren’t!
People were horrified that what they knew to be contaminated land was being portrayed by Stockport Council as completely safe. After much harranguing by local residents the Council grudgingly carried out contamination investigations. These were completely inadequate, not on a strict grid pattern as is stipulated by BS 10175, no contamination pits at all were dug where the actual school was going, which is directly over the rubbish infilled claypits, intensively tipped, the Council admits, from 1954 to 1974 at a time when no records were kept.
The planning application reference is:- DC024357.
Please forgive the large amount of evidence I have posted up here. If children are killed in road accidents around the school or their tiny lungs have the irritation of asbestos fibres which disable and finally kill them, I want the lawyers acting for their parents to have access to all the evidence they need to bring damages cases or corporate manslaughter charges against the relevant council officers, Executive Councillors, and outside firms who bent the law or the truth to get this development passed.
———————————————————————————————
Before using the vexatious branding of the FOIA to silence me they tried this lie. I had already seen the documents pertaining to the new school. They were on the chair in project manager Donna Sager’s office. I just wanted to re-read them and read any new documents.
This was the original, inadequate investigation local people made them carry out.
The school was going directly over the rubbish infilled clay pits.
No-one wanted the new primary school to go on a toxic site except the LibDem councillors
The council repeatedly lied and said the site was safe, although they knew it wasn’t.
They didn’t want to disturb the football pitch, which is directly over the toxic, rubbish filled claypits, tipped before 1974 when no records of what was tipped were kept. It was also exactly where the school was going.
These trial pits should have been on a strict grid pattern. The Executive Councillor in charge, Mark Weldon, consistently lied to me and claimed this had been done. The CBR investigations are nothing to do with contamination, rather the stability of the land. TP5/05 and TP6/05 weren’t dug at all because the Council didn’t own the land.
TP1/2/3 and4/05 were sunk nowhere near where the school was going.
The above document shows the very high Carbon Dioxide levels being emitted.
The one bore hole investigations.
They proposed to protect primary school children from toxic waste by planting prickly bushes, which would have lost their prickly leaves due to the contamination. To mention that fact was being vexatious.
The contamination investigations I finally made them do. Inadequate but better.
The brown asbestos fibres allegedly being removed using a bin bag and stick by migrant workers who don’t understand their task because they take off their respirators. A builder walks past unprotected.
