29th August 202
A primary school now stands on a former Stockport dump site that council officials once tried to build on without properly assessing the risk of contamination.
The site in question, on Harcourt Street in North Reddish, had a long and troubled planning history. Local MP Andrew Gwynne branded it a “poison minefield,” and council records show planning permission had been refused for the land on three separate occasions back in 1974 on contamination grounds. Despite that history, the council later selected the site for a new combined primary school — a replacement for three well-liked local schools that were to be closed — even though the site had also been earmarked in the town plan for public open space and for a smaller single-school rebuild.
A Decision Made Without the Full Picture
Documents and press coverage from the time show the council’s own process for evaluating the site fell well short of its obligations. The Environment Agency, a statutory consultee given the site’s history of flooding risk and contamination to groundwater — including an aquifer and springs in the area — was not approached until just three days before a crucial planning committee decision in August. The decision itself was then delegated to the council’s director of planning rather than debated by councillors in open committee.
When the Environment Agency’s objection did arrive, it was serious: officials said the application had not provided sufficient information about the risk of pollution to controlled waters, and that until that risk was properly understood, the application should not be approved. Yet a councillor sitting on the relevant committee said he had no recollection of the objection being discussed at all, and it was not recorded in the official minutes.
A council spokesman later conceded that consultation with the Environment Agency “should have been undertaken earlier,” admitting officials had wrongly assumed it wasn’t a legal requirement. The council said its procedures had since been reviewed.
A Narrow Test for a Site-Wide Problem
Objectors trying to raise the alarm about contamination faced a further obstacle: rather than triggering a full, site-wide environmental assessment, concerns about the land’s safety were addressed through a public footpath diversion inquiry — a process designed to decide whether a single corridor of land was safe enough for a right of way to pass through it, not whether an entire site was fit for a primary school.
That distinction mattered. Years later, when construction was under way, testing found the site was contaminated far more extensively than the narrow footpath inquiry had ever examined. The cost of the school project rose sharply — from an original £5.5 million to £11 million — after significant levels of lead, arsenic and asbestos were discovered in the ground. The site had previously been used by a brickworks, giving it a commercial history similar to other former industrial land nearby that had been refused planning permission for exactly this reason.
Campaigner Sheila Oliver, who fought the development for years and pursued the issue through repeated Freedom of Information requests, has argued that the council effectively knew the land was contaminated and downplayed it because full remediation would have been prohibitively expensive. She has also raised concerns about the adequacy of insurance held by the council and its contractors against long-term pollution and asbestos-related claims — concerns that remain unresolved.
A Pattern, Not an Isolated Error
Local campaigners and commentators have pointed out that the Harcourt Street case did not happen in isolation. A local newspaper’s letters page at the time noted a “continual list” of council planning errors, arguing this made it more plausible that Harcourt Street was another example of institutional failure rather than a one-off mistake.
The wider pattern is not unique to Stockport. Councils around the country have faced similar criticism for building schools on old industrial or waste sites — including a case in Leeds where officials admitted “serious levels of contamination across the whole site” but pressed ahead regardless, judging removal too costly, and a case in Barnsley where a primary school was permanently closed in 2003 after pupils and staff suffered unexplained respiratory and neurological symptoms linked to the site’s history as a former coking plant.
For families whose children now attend the North Reddish school, the central question remains whether the site was ever properly proven safe before building began — or whether, as with the planning process itself, safety was assumed rather than established.
