1st September 2026
A January 2007 letter from Stockport Council’s then Corporate Director of Children’s Services has thrown fresh light on how the controversial Vale View Primary School project was presented to the public in its early stages.
In the letter, dated 22 January 2007, Andrew Webb responded to a Freedom of Information request from local resident Sheila Oliver. She had asked why the Fir Tree school site had been ruled out and requested the minutes of meetings about the proposed new school on Harcourt Street.
Webb’s reply was clear on the first point. He said the only site considered feasible was Harcourt Street, which had been earmarked for a new school for around 30 years. Fir Tree was further from the centre of the pupil population, and parental preference favoured Harcourt Street. He referred back to a July 2005 School Organisation Committee paper that had reached the same conclusion.
On the request for meeting minutes, however, the answer was a refusal. Webb confirmed that the Council held the information but said retrieving and redacting an estimated 1,680 pages would cost £2,450 — well above the £450 limit set by FOI regulations. He invited Mrs Oliver to narrow her request.
At the time the letter was written, the project was already carrying significant unresolved issues. Internal documents from the same period show officers had been instructed to limit the permanent school to 525 places despite higher pupil projections. Funding concerns were being noted. Drainage works were covered only by a provisional sum of £200,000, and within months the project risk register would rate the chance of Environment Agency requirements exceeding that sum as high.
The overall cost of the scheme later rose sharply. By March 2008 the Executive was noting a revised estimate of £9.94 million — a substantial increase on earlier figures — before the full extent of contamination on the former clay-pit and tip site was publicly acknowledged. After the school opened, Council officers and Reddish Police recorded serious traffic and road-safety problems at the Harcourt Street access.
Webb’s 2007 letter therefore sits at a pivotal moment. It offered a confident public defence of the chosen site while simultaneously limiting access to the internal discussions that would have shown how capacity, cost and ground-condition risks were being handled. The cost-limit refusal was lawful under the Freedom of Information Act, but its practical effect was to keep contemporaneous Project Board and other minutes out of public view during a critical phase of decision-making.
Fifteen years on, the school is open and serving the area. The contemporaneous papers, however, continue to raise questions about how thoroughly the accumulating difficulties were examined — and how much of that examination was visible to the residents most affected by the project.
