29th August 2026
In October 2006, more than ten months before Stockport Council granted planning permission for a new primary school on a former playing field in North Reddish, local resident Sheila Oliver wrote to the Chair of Sport England with a specific warning. The council, she said, would tell people they could play on the school’s pitch once it was built — but she suspected there would be “many restrictions placed on them as to when it could actually be used.”
Nearly two decades later, that prediction appears to have been borne out. What follows is the timeline of a promise made, apparently redirected, and never clearly accounted for.
The Warning
Oliver’s letter to Sport England set out what was at stake. The Harcourt Street site, she wrote, had originally been a toxic waste dump, but had grassed over during the intervening years to become a valued community open space used for football. She noted the council had already posted “no ball games” signs on most other green spaces in the area, that traffic in the vicinity was already severe enough for the council to acknowledge collisions with pedestrians, and that the council had recently closed a local swimming pool while investing the proceeds into swimming provision in a wealthier part of the borough. Losing the site, she argued, would strip an already deprived area of its last remaining sporting opportunity.
She also raised a related, pre-existing grievance: some £197,000 in commuted sums interest had reportedly been earmarked for children’s playgrounds in deprived parts of Stockport, with no evidence it had been spent more than a year on. She noted that play equipment at Harcourt Street itself — originally paid for by residents — had been dismantled by the council over a decade earlier and never replaced. She asked Sport England to consider objecting to the planning application on the grounds of playing field loss, and copied her letter to the council’s Leader, its Executive Member for Leisure, and its Head of Development Control.
The Justification
The application went ahead. When the council’s own planning officer reported on it, the report acknowledged the site’s existing use — “informal for recreation and more formally for organised sport” — but did not point to a separate replacement playing field elsewhere. Instead, it argued that the new school’s own sports facilities, made available to the community outside school hours, would meet Sport England’s requirements and deliver wider societal benefit, citing hours of operation extending to 9pm on weekdays and 6pm at weekends.
The Figures
Correspondence obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007 shows the council’s own account of what this was meant to include. Beyond the roughly £7.6 million core cost of the school, officers said a further £625,000 had emerged through the planning process specifically to meet policy requirements — covering, they stated, a newly laid sports pitch, a multi-use games area, additional changing facilities, and landscaping at the Harcourt Street site itself. This funding was tied to the sale of a separate council asset, the former Fir Tree Nursery site, whose capital receipt officers said represented a significant part of the funding package. When questioned, officers could not fully account for a roughly £100,000 discrepancy between the site’s stated value and the sum actually credited to the school scheme.
The Redirection
By 2013, the promised provision at Harcourt Street itself could not be found. Oliver’s repeated questions to council executive councillors about the “missing” replacement playing fields were dismissed as vexatious rather than substantively answered. A separate Freedom of Information response from around the same time indicated that a different piece of sports infrastructure — a Multi-Use Games Area developed with Reddish North End Football Club, funded by a £418,000 Football Foundation grant, a £60,000 council “Formal Sports Commuted Sum,” and £3,000 from the NHS — had been built not at Harcourt Street but at the former Fir Tree Nursery site instead.
The Confirmation
More than a decade further on, a direct enquiry to the school found no sporting facilities available for general public use. A Multi-Use Games Area does exist on site, but functions as a pupil play surface rather than a bookable community facility — there is no evidence of public booking arrangements, published opening hours for non-pupils, or any access route for local residents. The only outside use identified was a fee-based holiday club run by a private coaching company during school holidays: paid, child-only provision, not the open community sporting access originally used to justify the loss of the site’s playing field.
The Unanswered Question
Two decades after Oliver first warned Sport England that access to any future pitch would likely come with unstated restrictions, the outcome appears starker than even she predicted: not a restricted pitch, but no public access at all. In between, the council’s own paperwork describes specific, funded, on-site facilities that were supposedly delivered in 2007; a comparable facility was instead delivered miles away using different funding; and a nearby, separate pot of money earmarked for deprived-area play provision was, by Oliver’s account, already sitting unspent well before any of this began.
Stockport Council has been asked, over many years and by more than one route, to clarify what became of the replacement sporting provision promised at Harcourt Street. It has not provided a substantive answer, and on at least one occasion questions on the subject were dismissed as vexatious rather than addressed. Whether the failure lies in planning, in funding, or simply in follow-through, one fact is not in dispute: the community access used to justify building over a public playing field in one of Stockport’s more deprived wards does not exist today.
