30th August 2026
Part Four of an investigation into Stockport Council’s handling of Michael Parnell, 2009
Not every chapter of this story took place in a courtroom or a police cell. Some of the fiercest exchanges happened by email, as a local campaigner tried — and largely failed — to get the Crown Prosecution Service to explain its own decisions.
A charge dismissed, the same day as a conviction
On 10 July 2009, Michael Parnell stood before Stockport Magistrates’ Court twice. The first matter was the assault charge involving council employee Frank Croughwell, which resulted in conviction, a fine, and the Anti-Social Behaviour Order that would shape the following four years. The second, dealt with at a mention hearing immediately afterwards, was a wholly separate charge of breach of the peace, alleged to have occurred on 20 April 2009 — the same weekend on which Parnell says he was arrested three times while trying to have his personal data removed from the council’s website.
The Crown offered no evidence. The Magistrates dismissed the case.
The coincidence of timing is worth noting without over-interpreting it: on the day Parnell was convicted of one offence, a wholly unconnected charge — arising from his protest over a data breach the council had itself admitted and apologised for — collapsed for lack of evidence.
Four nights in custody
The “sneeze” conviction that would eventually be overturned on appeal in January 2010 was not, in the meantime, a paper penalty. Correspondence from September 2009 records that Parnell was held in custody for four nights following the charge — that he was, in Sheila Oliver’s words at the time, “sent to prison” over an allegation that he had coughed or sneezed at a council employee with intent to give them a cold. The same correspondence states that CCTV footage existed of the incident, and that it was not shown in court.
By this point in September 2009, Oliver’s own tally — set out in correspondence to the CPS, GMP’s Chief Constable, and Parnell’s local MP among others — put the number of arrests at twelve, and the number of occasions police had been called out over the affair at ninety. Those figures were her own contemporaneous count rather than anything verified by the council or police, but they were being put, in writing, to the public bodies best placed to correct them if they were wrong — and nothing in the surviving record suggests anyone did.
A campaigner shut out
Sheila Oliver, a Stockport resident who had been corresponding with the council and the CPS on Parnell’s behalf, spent much of the autumn of 2009 trying to establish why his pending appeal against an earlier conviction had been delayed to January 2010. The Crown Prosecution Service’s response was to close the door. Cheryl Hramiak, the Branch Crown Prosecutor for Salford, Stockport and Trafford, told her in October that queries about the case should be directed to Parnell’s own solicitors, and by November had gone further: “I am unable to communicate with you further on this case. All future correspondence will be between the Crown Prosecution Service and Mr Parnell’s legal representatives.”
Oliver’s own emails from this period, since released, are unrestrained. She pressed the CPS on why the appeal was being deferred while Parnell was, in her words, under restrictions so severe he could not attend routine appointments; she asked whether the delay served the public interest of shielding security guards from being shown in court “to have not told the truth”; and she threatened to copy in the local press and the Guardian’s then editor, Alan Rusbridger. She also, in one email, drew a pointed connection to the fact that Keir Starmer — now Prime Minister, then Director of Public Prosecutions — held that office during the period these decisions were made. He was written to three times about the case.
The CPS’s formal response to Oliver’s Freedom of Information request, when it came, was a conventional one. Citing sections 30(1)(c) and 40(2) of the Act, the CPS set out — at some length, and with a reasoned public interest balancing exercise — why it would not disclose correspondence relating to its handling of the case: releasing evidential material supplied in confidence, it argued, could discourage others from coming forward in future, and the personal data of third parties involved warranted protection. Whatever frustration the refusal caused at the time, it does not, on its face, read as an improper or evasive use of the exemptions available.
What the pattern shows, and doesn’t
Four years on, and four instalments into this series, a consistent shape has emerged: an underlying grievance about withdrawn adoption support that was never resolved through ordinary means; a council response that escalated steadily in scale, from a single building ban to an exclusion zone covering most of the town centre; a run of prosecutions in which convictions were the exception rather than the rule; and, running alongside all of it, an information landscape in which those trying to scrutinise how the case was being handled — Parnell himself, and campaigners like Sheila Oliver — were repeatedly rebuffed.
None of this proves that any individual decision, by the council, the police or the CPS, was made in bad faith. Each of the refusals and each of the enforcement actions can be, and mostly were, defended on conventional institutional grounds. But taken together, over several years, the pattern is one that deserves to be examined in full — which is the purpose of this series.
Further instalments will follow as outstanding documents — including the outcome of the original ASBO breach trial, the appeal judgment of January 2010, and any surviving correspondence relating to the council’s handling of complaints against its own security contractors — come to light.
