1st September 2026
Part 8 of an investigation into Stockport Council’s handling of Michael Parnell, 2010–2011
Read enough of Stockport Council’s own paperwork on Michael Parnell and a pattern starts to repeat itself with almost mechanical regularity: an ordinary, often trivial act — using a toilet, standing on a public step, asking a question at a meeting — becomes a “situation,” the situation becomes a call to the police, and the call to the police becomes another entry in a growing file that nobody with the power to stop it ever seemed willing to close.
A Toilet, an ASBO, and a Question of Validity
On 5 January 2011, Mr Parnell was interviewed by police at Cheadle Heath Police Station under caution, on tape, over an alleged breach of his ASBO. His account, recorded verbatim in the police report, was that he had been on the steps outside the Town Hall — not inside it — sitting on his chair, “looking at the Lamboroghini showroom.” He told officers he did not believe the order restricting him from Stockport Town Hall was even valid any longer, because two of the parties named on it “no longer work for the council.”
The interviewing officer put it to him plainly: were his conditions not to enter Stockport Town Hall. His answer, recorded as a direct quote: “Yes, not to enter Stockport Town Hall.” The document as a whole is really an argument about geography and jurisdiction — steps versus building, “on” versus “in” — being conducted through a police interview room, over a man sitting in a chair reading a shop window.
That interview didn’t happen in isolation. An internal Council incident log — separate from the police file, but covering an earlier and strikingly similar episode — records Mr Parnell using the toilets inside the Town Hall after satisfying himself, from the Council’s own website, that the nearest public convenience was there. He was in and out, by his own estimate, within ten minutes. It was the building’s manageress who initiated the exchange on his way out, asking what he was doing there. In the resulting police notes, Mr Parnell can be heard correcting himself mid-sentence — starting to say he hadn’t breached his ASBO, then stopping to reframe it more cautiously as “if she was getting into a conversation.” That’s not the speech pattern of someone spoiling for confrontation. It’s the speech pattern of someone who has learned, from long experience, that even a bathroom visit could be turned into evidence against him.
“The Wording Was Too Vague”
The clearest official admission of how thin the case against him really was comes not from a campaigner but from the police themselves. A message logged from an officer, PC Wrecks, records that Mr Parnell had been interviewed, held by the Custody Sergeant and reviewed by an Evidence Review Officer — and released with no further charge. The reason given internally: the wording of the ASBO was considered “too vague” and did not specify the request that it be referred back to the council (referred to in the notes as “SVBC”) if needed. The conclusion, recorded in black and white: “they thought it was unlikely to get a conviction if the case went to court.”
That is worth sitting with. An order restrictive enough to trigger police interviews under caution was, by the police’s own internal assessment, not drafted precisely enough to actually secure a conviction. The defect wasn’t Mr Parnell’s conduct. It was the order itself.
A Log of Escalations
A separate Council incident log, running across several dates in July, shows the same cycle repeating with the regularity of a metronome. Mr Parnell arrives at the Edward Street reception steps — on one occasion with a large sign stating he had been assaulted by security staff — to attend a public committee meeting advertised on the Council’s own noticeboard. Reception staff are advised to keep him out. He is told to leave. He asks to be allowed to attend the meeting, or to use the toilet, or to obtain an agenda, or to speak to a named officer about representation on his council tax case. Legal officers are consulted about whether his conduct meets the threshold for a breach. Security staff are called. Eventually, police are called. On one occasion, the log records, “by 4.40pm the police had not arrived” — while the confrontation over whether one man could sit in a public reception area had already been running for the better part of an hour.
On another date, the log notes that police “refused to attend as they believe he is not currently breaching his ASBO,” and that legal officers advised the correct approach was for the Council to reject his request rather than escalate to a breach allegation — advice that, notably, was not always followed.
Read individually, each entry looks like a minor administrative footnote. Read together, across dates and years, they describe an institution that had normalised treating one elderly resident’s presence in a public building as a security incident by default.
The Officer Who Wouldn’t Take “Yes” for an Answer
Ms Oliver’s efforts to act formally on Mr Parnell’s behalf ran into their own bureaucratic wall. In August and September 2010, she submitted a data request on his behalf, backed by a signed letter of authority, to Claire Naven, the Council’s Data Protection and Freedom of Information Officer. Naven’s response was that she required “the information I require from Mr Parnell” directly before she would proceed — despite, as Ms Oliver points out, never having written to Mr Parnell herself to ask him for it. The £10 fee cheque was returned, unprocessed, the request going nowhere.
Whether or not that was a deliberate catch-22, its effect was the same either way: a formal channel that should have produced information was instead the reason none was produced.
A Complaints Process Investigating Itself
By March 2012, Ms Oliver’s complaint had been through a “Stage 1” response from Corporate Director Steve Houston that did not uphold it. When she asked for the Stage 2 review to be handled by someone other than Corporate Complaints Manager Anwar Majothi — on the grounds that he had, in her words, been “up to his neck in this case” for years and had not acted on a statutory duty she believed the Council owed Mr Parnell — she was told this would be “inappropriate,” since Majothi was “specifically tasked with investigating complaints at Stage 2.”
Her written response to Houston laid out, point by point, why she considered the Stage 1 findings inadequate: that her letter of authority to act for Mr Parnell remained valid absent written confirmation to the contrary; that the Council’s claim she “had not raised this matter before” was contradicted by years of email correspondence with successive chief executives, council leaders and executive councillors; and that Mr Parnell “tried and tried and tried” to complain through proper channels, only to be met — as she put it — with arrest for trying to enter council buildings, and, on one occasion, with her own intervention needed to stop him being arrested simply for trying to leave a council meeting early.
The Question Nobody Wanted to Answer
Long before any of this reached a complaints procedure, Ms Oliver had already put the underlying issue to elected members directly. At a Stepping Hill Area Committee meeting on 7 December 2008 — with the Council Leader and Executive Councillors Hogg, Smith and Weldon present — she asked a public question noting that the Council had, by her count, called the police to Mr Parnell somewhere between 30 and 40 times, tying up hours of police officer and duty solicitor time. At the time she asked it, he was on bail over an allegation that would later be described, drily, in her own account, as “common assault with a sneeze.”
He was acquitted on all charges after a three-day Crown Court appeal — a hearing she notes cost in the region of £10,000 a day. CCTV evidence shown in court, by her account, showed no sneeze at all. What the same hearing did establish, on her account, was that the security guards involved had not told the truth about the incident. The same guards’ accounts, she says, continued to be relied on by police in later dealings with Mr Parnell regardless.
What Connects All of This
None of these documents, taken alone, proves an institutional conspiracy. What they show, taken together, is a machine that never seemed to ask itself the one question a competent organisation should have asked at almost any point along the way: is this proportionate? An ASBO too vague to convict on. A public convenience visit treated as grounds for a caution interview. A £10 data request bounced back on a technicality that made no sense. A complaints process where the person accused of years of inaction was also the person deciding whether to investigate himself.
Mr Parnell is no longer here to see whether anyone in authority ever does ask that question. Ms Oliver’s files suggest she has been asking it, in one form or another, since at least 2008.
