1st September 2026
Part 9 of an investigation into Stockport Council’s handling of Michael Parnell, 2010–2011
The Vulnerable Person the Council’s Own Policy Couldn’t Protect.
On 27 May 2011, Ms Oliver wrote directly to Peter Jones, copying in a list of senior councillors and officers, opening with a fact that the Council itself does not appear to dispute: Mr Parnell was formally listed by the Council as a vulnerable person.
That designation should have meant something. Instead, her letter lays out how it collided head-on with the exclusion order keeping him out of Fred Perry House and the Town Hall. He could not access the help the Council itself said he was entitled to — Citizens Advice, Welfare Rights — because reaching it meant setting foot in a building he was banned from, under threat, on her account, of up to five years in prison for breach. “He was not able to access the help available to him,” she wrote, “as if he was not allowed to enter Fred Perry House he faced 5 years in prison.”
The same letter states that the restraining order was cut in force by a successful appeal to the Crown Court, and that council employees were found there to have used “aggressive behaviour and language towards him,” with video evidence available “on request” to anyone who disputed it. It states, too, that the Council had “no documentary evidence” for the council tax arrears it was pursuing him over — a claim consistent with the confused, contradictory year-by-year figures this series has already documented at length.
Her letter closes by asking a question that reads less like campaigning rhetoric than a genuine test of institutional accountability: whether senior officers and executive councillors named in the case — she names Barry Khan, (Dave Goddard is named elsewhere), and Sue Derbyshire — were “even insurable as holders of public office.” It is, on the face of it, a fair question to put to any organisation whose conduct is under this level of sustained challenge. Whether it was ever answered is not clear from anything in this file.
Confirmed, in the Council’s Own Words: “Over 70 Times”
For years, the figure at the centre of this series — how often the police were called to deal with Mr Parnell — has come from Ms Oliver’s own count. One document removes any doubt about whether the Council itself accepted the scale of it.
Responding to a 2009 information request, the Council’s FOI officer, Claire Naven, described the request itself in her own reply as one seeking “evidence of any senior council officer’s involvement in this case — which is the calling of the police to the peaceful town hall protestor over 70 times.” The information was ultimately refused, on data protection grounds under section 40(2) of FOIA — but the description of what was being asked about was written by the Council, not by Ms Oliver. Whatever the merits of withholding the underlying evidence, the Council’s own paperwork confirms that “over 70 times” was the figure it understood itself to be answering for.
Conviction, Then Acquittal
Two separate legal proceedings emerge from this batch of documents, and it matters that they are kept distinct.
The first was a trial at Stockport Magistrates’ Court, reported to Ms Oliver in an email from the Council Leader’s office dated 15 July [2009], over an alleged assault on a named individual. District Judge Berg convicted Mr Parnell, describing him in the judge’s own words as “evasive,” his conduct “deliberate and provocative,” and finding the two prosecution witnesses “persuasive and straightforward.” He was fined £150, ordered to pay £250 costs and a £15 surcharge, and given a two-year Anti-Social Behaviour Order. The same email pointedly notes, twice, that “the Magistrates court has nothing whatsoever to do with Stockport Council” — a disclaimer worth noting given how much of what followed involved the Council directly.
A separate MG8 case summary, dated August 2008, documents an earlier, related episode: a letter banning Mr Parnell from Stopford House and the Town Hall from June 2007, followed by an incident on 18 August 2008 in which he entered the building despite the ban, was asked to leave, returned around an hour later, and was arrested for breach of the peace after officers judged — based on his reply of “I’ll go back in” — that a further breach was likely. He was remanded to appear at Stockport Magistrates’ Court.
It is this ASBO, and the conviction underpinning it, that Ms Oliver’s other documents describe him later appealing — successfully — at Crown Court, where, on her account, the security guards’ evidence was found unreliable and no sneeze was visible on the CCTV shown to the court. If that sequence is right, then the order restricting Mr Parnell’s movements for two years traces back to a conviction that was later overturned on appeal — which would mean the years of subsequent incident reports, police call-outs and interviews under caution documented earlier in this series were largely generated by an order that should not, in the end, have stood.
The Cost of Winning
Even where Mr Parnell’s position was ultimately vindicated, it came at a price. Ms Oliver’s May 2011 letter states that court costs of £86 and £83 — inconsistently applied, in her account, at different points — were charged against him in a council tax arrears case that he won. In the same period, she states, he was made subject to an 8am–8pm curfew, house arrest by another name, applied, in her words, to “a very sick man.”
What This Batch Adds
Individually, none of these four documents is a smoking gun. Together, they close a gap that mattered: they establish, from the Council’s own correspondence rather than solely from Ms Oliver’s records, that the volume of police involvement was acknowledged internally at “over 70 times”; that a vulnerable-person designation existed on paper without functioning in practice; and that the legal basis for years of subsequent enforcement action rested on a conviction that did not survive appeal. Whether Stockport Council has ever reconciled those three facts with each other, in any internal review, is the question this series keeps arriving back at.
