31st August 2026
Documents reveal a decade-old financial mystery surrounding Stockport’s proposed North Reddish school
A proposed new primary school in Stockport that was originally expected to cost around £5.5 million eventually reached an estimated £11 million, while millions of pounds of funding were being moved around the Council’s school-building programme.
Now a collection of contemporaneous Council documents and correspondence raises questions about how the project’s finances were managed — and why repeated requests for an explanation were not answered.
The proposed school was planned for the Harcourt Street playing-field site in North Reddish, despite concerns about contamination at the site.
Documents show the estimated cost escalating rapidly. Within months, figures of approximately £7.5 million, then £8.2 million, and ultimately around £10 million appeared in the project’s financial history before contamination remediation costs were added.
Yet the financial questions were being raised while the project was still developing.
In August 2007, campaigner Sheila Oliver wrote directly to then Council Leader Councillor Dave Goddard after spotting what she regarded as a discrepancy in a Council planning document.
She quoted a Council document saying that the proposed sale of the Fir Tree site would provide 20 per cent of the cost of the new school, then stated that she understood the sale would raise only about £1.2 million, with a further £600,000 associated with Sport England requirements.
Her question was blunt:
How could the Fir Tree sale represent 20 per cent of an £8.5 million school?
The significance of that question becomes clearer when another Council response is examined.
In August 2007, Stockport Council responded to an FOI request concerning the proposed North Reddish school and school-site sales.
The response stated that the Targeted Capital Fund funding allocated to the Reddish North Primary School scheme had been used to finance projects at four other schools.
The amounts listed were:
- Brindale Pupil Referral Unit — £1.020 million
- Bradshaw Hall Primary School — £321,000
- Dial Park Primary School — £662,000
- Woodley Primary School — £240,000
Total:
£2.243 million
The Council said this had been done in accordance with permission contained in a Department for Education and Skills letter of 15 December 2004.
That raises an obvious question:
Why was £2.243 million originally allocated to the Reddish North scheme being used to finance other school projects, and how was the Reddish North scheme subsequently financed?
The answer may lie in the Council’s capital accounts and committee papers — but those records have yet to be assembled.
There is another remarkable document.
In November 2006, project manager Donna Sager wrote to Ms Oliver assuring her that there was no problem with the project’s funding.
But correspondence from around the same period records a £2.4 million shortfall on a project that had only recently been expected to cost £5.5 million.
The estimated cost subsequently continued to rise.
By the time the estimate reached approximately £10 million, the financial position had become dramatically different from that originally presented.
And there was another complication: the land on which the school was proposed was subsequently acknowledged to have significant contamination issues.
The Council’s own correspondence from 2007 shows that contamination was already having financial implications.
A ground investigation report discussed excavation and possible removal of contaminated material, with an allowance of £38,800 included in the cost plan for additional work in one area.
A further £82,350 was allowed for installation of a gas membrane.
The correspondence also acknowledged that the extent of excavation and removal had not yet been fully established and that the costs would develop as the work progressed.
At the same time, questions were being raised about whether the investigation had adequately established the condition of the whole site.
The proposed development therefore faced two moving targets: the cost was escalating, while the extent and treatment of contamination were still being worked out.
Yet the crucial question remains unanswered:
What did the project actually cost in the end?
Ms Oliver says she repeatedly tried to establish the answer.
In a letter to Councillor Goddard she stated that she had been drawing the Council’s attention to financial irregularities for many months, had supplied evidence, had raised questions in Council meetings and had made formal complaints.
The Council Leader’s response, dated 3 September 2009, is revealing.
Following a public question at the Council’s Executive Meeting on 1 September, Ms Oliver had asked:
“For the past 18 months or so I have tried very hard to draw the Council’s attention to financial anomalies of several millions of pounds without success.”
Councillor Goddard replied that he was unable to answer because, he said, the question did not provide details of the alleged anomalies and Ms Oliver was unwilling to identify them.
That response is difficult to reconcile, at least on its face, with the documentary correspondence already available.
Concerns about the cost were raised while the project was still live. In a letter to senior Stockport councillors and officers dated 15 September 2007, campaigner Sheila Oliver challenged the Council’s projected £8.5 million cost for the proposed Harcourt Street school. She set out her calculations comparing the proposed cost with government new-build figures and the Council’s own asset valuations, concluding that “something does not add up regarding the cost” and asking for a full explanation. This followed an earlier letter in August in which she had questioned the Council’s claim that the sale of the alternative Fir Tree site would provide 20% of the school’s cost. These documents are significant because they show that concerns about both the escalating cost and the proposed funding arrangements were being put directly to the Council at the time, rather than being raised only retrospectively. They also raise a straightforward question: if senior councillors and officers were being warned in 2007 that the project’s cost and funding did not appear to add up, what investigation was undertaken, and where is the resulting explanation?
Two years earlier, on 27 August 2007, Ms Oliver had put a specific funding question to the Council Leader concerning the Fir Tree site and the £8.5 million school cost.
The Council’s own FOI response of the same period also records the £2.243 million reallocation of funding originally allocated to the Reddish North scheme.
The documents therefore leave several questions hanging.
What was the original approved budget?
Why did the estimated cost rise from £5.5 million to approximately £11 million?
What was the final outturn cost?
How much additional money was ultimately required?
What happened to the £2.243 million of Targeted Capital Fund money allocated to Reddish North?
What did the Fir Tree land actually realise, and how was that receipt accounted for?
Did contamination contribute materially to the eventual cost?
And why was the alternative Fir Tree site not used for the new school?
None of these questions, by themselves, establishes fraud.
Nor does the existence of a large cost increase prove financial misconduct. Major public construction projects can experience substantial increases for entirely legitimate reasons.
But that is precisely why the questions deserve answers.
If there was a straightforward explanation for the movement of the money, the Council’s accounts and capital-programme records should, in principle, provide it.
And if the final cost was substantially different from the figures being presented during the project, taxpayers have a legitimate interest in knowing why.
There is an additional historical irony.
The Council Leader’s letter of September 2009 carried a footer stating that Stockport was “officially one of the best councils in Britain, according to the Audit Commission March 2009.”
For the campaigner who had spent years asking where millions of pounds had gone, that endorsement must have made the unanswered questions all the more striking.
The mystery is not whether the figures changed.
The documents show that they did.
The mystery is how the project got from £5.5 million to around £11 million, how the funding was rearranged along the way, what the final bill was — and why a citizen repeatedly asking for the figures was unable to obtain a satisfactory answer.
