1st September 2026

Part Six of an investigation into Stockport Council’s handling of Michael Parnell, 2010–2011

Michael Parnell and his wife adopted two girls placed with them by Stockport Council in April 1993, under Section 31 of the Local Authority Care Act. Both girls had been taken into care in Wigan in 1991; a freeing order for adoption followed in November 1995, and the adoption was finalised in May 1996.

Before the placement, the Council itself assessed the Parnells’ income as low — under £10,000 take-home pay — and it was placement officers who recommended Mr Parnell give up overtime so he could spend time with the children. On that income he should have qualified for Council Tax Benefit from the start. He didn’t claim it, because — as the case notes put it — “no-one told them they could.” Child Benefit, automatic for a birth-registered child, works differently for an adopted child, and again nobody advised the family how to claim it.

It was 1998 before Mr and Mrs Parnell asked for help and were placed on Council Tax Benefit. Their financial circumstances did not change between then and 2002. That is not a claim Ms Oliver has had to dig for — it is the Council’s own account, confirmed in Recovery Manager Peter Jones’s letter of 28 April 2011, which states plainly that “these accounts show a shortfall between the charges and credits (benefit and payments) which gives rise to the outstanding balance,” referring back to records provided “from 1st April 2000.”

Hounded in Intensive Care

According to Ms Oliver, at a point when Mr Parnell was critically ill in intensive care, the Council continued to pursue him for alleged Council Tax arrears of £24 — this for a household that had been on full Council Tax Benefit for years, with unchanged circumstances, and which the Council had itself designated a vulnerable taxpayer. Also according to Ms Oliver, the police had already declined to arrest Mr Parnell after representations were made directly to the then Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, Sir Peter Fahy.

If the Council’s own vulnerability flag was on file, continuing recovery action against a man in intensive care over a sum that small raises an obvious question: who authorised it, and did anyone check the file before picking up the phone or sending the letter?

The Spreadsheet That Was Never Handed Over

Peter Jones’s letter of 31 January 2011 refers to “the spreadsheet provided to Mr Parnell at my meeting with him on the 21st January” — part, he writes, of a response to seven questions “agreed with him in December.” Ms Oliver says Mr Parnell was never given that spreadsheet.

That matters, because the spreadsheet in question is not a trivial document. It runs from 1998 to 2010 and shows, by the Council’s own reckoning:

  • Total liability: £12,308.19
  • Total benefit awarded: £3,593.04
  • Total costs: £119.00
  • Total payments made: £6,904.47
  • Closing balance: £1,929.68

Handwritten on the copy Ms Oliver holds is a note reading “owed to Mr & Mrs Parnell” — a very different characterisation from a family in arrears.

If a document is being cited by the Council as the basis for its position, and as evidence that outstanding questions have already been answered, but the person it was supposedly given to says he never received it, that is not a minor filing error. It goes to whether the family were ever able to check the Council’s arithmetic against what they’d actually been told.

A Decade of “Why?”

The typed notes in Ms Oliver’s file read less like a complaint and more like an audit — because that is effectively what they are. Line after line asks the same question of the Council’s own figures:

  • 2003: liability was £1,022.51. The family were told they now owed £1,679.27. “Why?” The Council’s own explanation was that clerical errors had been discovered, and it then demanded £5,000 back in one lump sum — before agreeing, by the end of December 2003, that full benefit was in fact due.
  • 1995–96: a rapid sequence of contradictory notices, all covering the same period (1 April 1995 – 31 March 1996): told he owed £156.44, then £13.04, then that he was actually £56.66 in credit, then £8.78 in credit, then that he owed one penny. Each entry in the notes ends the same way: “why?”
  • 2009: £66 in costs charged for a failed court case, which the notes argue should have been refunded rather than added to the balance.
  • Repeated instances of Council Tax being paid by Mr Parnell between April 1993 and January 1995 that, on the Council’s own case, should never have been charged in the first place — because he was on means-tested benefit throughout and owed nothing.

Peter Jones’s own explanation, in the 31 January 2011 letter, is that “later adjustments such as payments made in a later year or changes in benefit entitlement made in one year but relating to an earlier year, show in the year the change was made, not the year they are related to.” That is offered as a technical accounting convention. For a family trying to work out from year to year whether they were in credit or in debt, it meant the numbers on any given letter could not be taken at face value — and, on this evidence, frequently weren’t.

The Council’s Own Number Doesn’t Match Its Own Story

Buried in the same 31 January 2011 letter is a statement that narrows the Council’s case considerably. Having set out a full year-by-year table from 2000 to 2010, Jones writes that it shows two things: that 2000, 2001 and 2002 “were fully rebated with Council Tax Benefit,” and that “there are amounts outstanding on accounts for 2 years” — no more. The table itself identifies which two: 2007, with a balance of £590.64, and 2009, with a balance of £1,339.04. Every other year, on the Council’s own reconciliation, nets to zero.

That is the Council’s own arithmetic, in its own letter, signed off under the authority of the Corporate Director of Business Services. It leaves £24 — the figure Ms Oliver says the Council was still pursuing while Mr Parnell lay in intensive care — unaccounted for by the Council’s own reconciliation. If the Council’s position is that only two specific years carried any balance at all, the obvious question for it to answer is where a £24 demand, made separately and later, is supposed to fit.

The Council’s Position

To be clear about what the Council has said in its own words: Mr Jones maintains that full explanations were given “in the first instance in May 2003 by a letter and revised accounts and most recently in a letter from myself dated 3rd December 2010,” and that the underlying figures are consistent across every version of the account he has produced. Stockport Council would, as in previous instalments of this series, be given the opportunity to respond to the specific points raised here before publication.