1st September 2026
Part 7 of an investigation into Stockport Council’s handling of Michael Parnell, 2010–2011
By the time Ms Oliver took her concerns to the very top of Greater Manchester’s policing structure, the pattern she was trying to get someone — anyone — to examine had been running for years: Stockport Council repeatedly calling in the police over Michael Parnell, the pensioner and Town Hall protestor she had spent a decade documenting the Council’s treatment of. Her complaint was not really about a single incident. It was about the sheer volume of it — calls to the police that she believed amounted to hundreds of hours of police time spent pursuing a man she had come to see as a victim of the Council’s own record-keeping, not a threat to anyone.
She put that complaint to the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester, naming the then Chief Constable, Sir Peter Fahy, as the person who ought to answer for it. The reply came back on 8 September 2014, from a solicitor in the Commissioner’s office, Nigel Battersby.
“There Is No Record”
The letter opens by noting that Ms Oliver’s complaint concerned the involvement of Greater Manchester Police officers from the Stockport Division, and “the manner in which they dealt with the former Stockport Town Hall protestor, the late Michael Parnell, when calls were made to the police for assistance by Stockport Council.” It records her view plainly: that this amounted to “a waste of hundreds of hours of police time in persecuting Mr Parnell.”
And then comes the line that decided everything that followed: “I have made enquiries of the Chief Constable’s Office but there is no record of Sir Peter Fahy ever having had any personal dealings with you.”
That single sentence did the job the Commissioner’s office needed it to do. Under section 12 of the Police Reform Act 2002, a complaint against a chief officer has to identify conduct on his part. Because Fahy had no documented personal involvement — because, in other words, the calls were handled further down the chain, by officers in Stockport Division, not by the Chief Constable himself — there was, in Battersby’s words, “no conduct on his part that has been directed towards you.” The complaint about the volume of police time, about the pattern the Council was allegedly generating year after year, was reframed as a complaint about Fahy personally, found not to meet that narrower test, and closed on that basis: “the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner does not propose to formally record your complaint as a conduct complaint against the Chief Constable as there is no evidence of any conduct on his part to satisfy the purposes of section 12.”
The Gap Between What Was Complained About and What Was Assessed
That is the crux of it. Ms Oliver was not complaining that Sir Peter Fahy had personally been rude to her, or personally attended an incident, or personally made a decision about Mr Parnell. She was complaining about a pattern of policing outcomes under his command — repeated call-outs generated by one council, against one household, over years. The Commissioner’s office answered a different, narrower question: did the Chief Constable have personal dealings with the complainant. He didn’t, so there was nothing to record.
By her account, that finding sits oddly against the volume of contact she says she had already had with Fahy’s office directly — “dozens if not hundreds” of times, by her own count, raising exactly this issue over the years the Council was, in her view, using the police as a recovery tool against a vulnerable and ultimately unwell man. Each of those approaches, she says, drew a reply from Nigel Battersby, and none of them, in her assessment, actually engaged with the substance of what was happening to Mr Parnell.
The letter does at least leave a door open: it tells her that if she is unhappy with the decision not to record the complaint, she has 28 days to appeal to the IPCC. Whether that route was pursued, or whether — like so much else in this story — it simply produced another polite letter declining to look further, is something the record so far doesn’t show.
Why It Matters
Complaints systems built around individual “conduct” are not well suited to complaints about a pattern of institutional behaviour. A chief constable can have no personal dealings with a complainant at all and still preside over a force whose local division spent, on Ms Oliver’s estimate, hundreds of hours responding to calls generated by a single council against a single elderly resident. If that estimate is even roughly right, the question of whether that was a reasonable and proportionate use of police time never actually got asked by anyone with the power to answer it — because the question was never the one the complaints process was designed to consider.
Mr Parnell is no longer here to see whether that question is ever answered. Ms Oliver is still asking it.
