30th August 2026
Part One of an investigation into Stockport Council’s handling of Michael Parnell, 2007–2013
For the best part of a decade, Michael Parnell was arrested, banned, prosecuted and excluded from large parts of his own town centre. By the time the last of the cases against him finally collapsed, he had been arrested dozens of times, convicted once, and subjected to restrictions that at one point barred him from entering an area covering most of central Stockport — including, for a time, the public toilets, the library and the railway station.
What emerges from years of council correspondence, police interview records, court documents and internal incident logs, gathered over more than a decade, is not a simple story of a “nuisance” resident being brought to heel. It is the story of a father who says he was fighting for statutory support for his two adopted daughters — and a council response that escalated, year on year, until the original grievance was almost lost from view.
Where it began
According to a Greater Manchester Police case summary prepared in August 2008, Parnell “has been in an ongoing dispute with Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council for several years regarding the provision of care to his two adopted teenage children.” The same document records that he had, by that point, been “conducting a protest outside council buildings every day for over a year.”
The root of the dispute, as Parnell maintained throughout, was straightforward: adoption support — including counselling for his daughters, funded in part through the charity After Adoption — had been withdrawn after the council ended its financial contribution. Parnell’s position, consistently, was that continued support was a right under the Children Act, not a discretionary extra.
Stockport Council’s own published policy lends some support to that argument. Its “Adoption Order and Adoption Support” guidance states plainly: “The new Adoption & Children Act 2002 recognises that Adoption Support should be life long. You can request an assessment of your needs at any point.”
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the underlying funding decision, it is clear that by 2007 the relationship between Parnell and the council had already broken down. On 28 August 2008, the council’s Legal Services department wrote to “clarify and remind” Parnell that he remained banned from entering Stopford House (the council’s main offices) except by prior appointment, and from Stockport Town Hall — including, the letter specified in some detail, the steps at all three of its public entrances — except during the course of a public meeting. The letter referred back to an earlier ban, which other documents place as far back as June 2007.
The first arrest
The first documented arrest came on 18 August 2008. Police records show Parnell entered Stopford House that day using a letter he claimed gave him permission to be there; he was asked to leave, returned a few hours later, and was arrested for breach of the peace after telling an officer, when asked what he would do if left on the street, “I’ll go back in.” He was charged and bailed to appear before Stockport Magistrates’ Court.
It would not be the last time a permission letter of disputed origin featured in the case. A separate council incident log from 2009 records staff noting that a letter Parnell produced, purporting to give him permission from the council to use the Town Hall toilets, had in fact been written by Parnell himself. Mrs Oliver has seen the letter written by the former Chief Executive of Stockport Council, John Schulz, giving Mr Parnell permission to use the town hall public lavatories.
A weekend of arrests over a data breach
In April 2009, Stockport Council disclosed at a full council meeting that the personal details of a number of residents — names, addresses and signatures — had been published, unredacted, on its own website. Parnell was one of those affected. According to his own account, recorded on video at the time, he was arrested three times over the following weekend while trying to get the council to remove his details. It was, in the end, a different resident’s complaint to the police and the Information Commissioner’s Office — not Parnell’s own repeated attempts — that finally got the data taken down, on the Monday.
The council later apologised in writing. In November 2009, Mike Iveson, then Head of Committee Services in the Chief Executive’s Directorate, wrote to Parnell: “I very much regret that the addresses and signatures were not removed or redacted beforehand.” He confirmed the material had been removed “almost immediately” once flagged, and that the practice had been discontinued.
The apology did not undo the three arrests that had already taken place. Nor, on the surviving record, was any connection drawn at the time between the scale of the response to Parnell’s protest and the fact that the underlying complaint — a serious and admitted breach of data protection law — had been valid all along.
A conviction, and an ASBO
On 13 July 2009, Parnell was convicted before District Judge Berg at Stockport Magistrates’ Court of assaulting a council employee, Frank Croughwell. He was fined £150, ordered to pay £250 costs and a £15 surcharge. The judge found the prosecution’s witnesses “persuasive and straightforward” and Parnell “evasive,” his conduct “deliberate and provocative.” A two-year Anti-Social Behaviour Order followed, restricting his access to Stockport Town Hall.
The scale of the council’s engagement with Parnell’s case by this point is striking. Emails released under the Freedom of Information Act show that Dave Goddard, then Leader of Stockport Council — later elevated to the House of Lords — was personally briefing a local campaigner, Sheila Oliver, on the outcome the same afternoon the verdict was handed down. When Oliver raised, in reply, a figure of 71 occasions on which police had been called regarding Parnell, and questioned the cost of the proceedings, Goddard’s response was blunt: “I hope you will forward this information to your media friends, if you don’t be assured I will.”
An internal council incident log from the same week records Goddard, together with a councillor referred to only as “Cllr Smith,” personally querying council staff over why Parnell was still being “allowed” to continue his protest outside the Town Hall.
Two days after the ASBO was imposed, on 16 July 2009, Parnell entered the Town Hall — by his own account, to use a toilet and to collect an agenda for a public meeting he was lawfully entitled to attend. He was arrested. The following morning, according to the council’s own log, police released him without charge: the Custody Sergeant and an Evidence Review Officer had concluded that the ASBO’s wording was “too vague” to support a realistic prospect of conviction.
It would not be the last time the precise wording of an order made against Michael Parnell became the central battleground of a case against him.
Part Two will cover the widening of the exclusion order, the five Stopford House breach charges of 2010, and the extraordinary run of three arrests in a single fortnight in January 2011.
