Part 12 of an investigation into Stockport Council’s handling of Michael Parnell, 2010–2011
Some of the most useful evidence in this case isn’t a council letter or a court document. It’s a notebook. Pages of contemporaneous notes, written in the moment, show two things happening side by side across the winter of 2008 into 2009: an elderly man being managed and moved along by an institution, and that same man quietly teaching himself the law the institution was supposed to be following.
The Admission on the Steps
At 12:15pm on 18 December 2008, on the Town Hall steps, a security guard named Steve struck up a conversation with Mr Parnell and told him, unprompted, that the police had already been to his home and taken his statement. What Steve said next is recorded, apparently verbatim, in the notebook: “You might not have been aware of it but when you sneezed I saw the spray go from you and go onto Frank’s jacket.”
That is a security guard — a witness the police were relying on — independently confirming, in a throwaway remark on the steps, that what happened was exactly what it sounds like. A man sneezed, and a fleck of it reached a jacket. Not a targeted assault. Not the “common assault with a sneeze with intent to inflict a cold” that would later be read out at a public committee meeting as though it were a serious charge.
Mr Parnell took this straight to his solicitor, Mr Warburton, and asked the obvious question: was a security guard approaching him unprompted, to relay what the police had been told, a form of intimidation or harassment. The timing makes the question sharper than it might otherwise be. The notebook records that at an Executive meeting held that same morning, the Council’s then Chief Executive, John Shultz, had told colleagues Mr Parnell would not be intimidated against or suffer victimisation by the local authority. Mr Parnell’s own note does the arithmetic: “then why is it in less than 1 hour this is being done.” He was, the same entry records, then told to leave by Steve.
A promise made in a boardroom at ten o’clock and undone on the front steps before eleven isn’t a small detail. It’s about as clean a piece of evidence as exists anywhere in this file for the gap between what the Council said about how it treated Mr Parnell and what it actually did.
A Test Written Down Before It Was Needed
Two months later, on 5 February 2009, the notebook shows a different kind of work. Someone — Mr Parnell sat down and methodically wrote out what the Human Rights Act actually requires of a public authority. The notes are precise: it is unlawful for a public authority to act incompatibly with a convention right; every public authority must understand and apply those rights in its day-to-day work, whether delivering a service directly or devising policy; and any “victim” can bring a case, with no requirement to be a UK citizen, provided they were directly affected by an act or omission of the authority.
One line from that page reads less like abstract legal theory than a verdict written in advance on everything documented elsewhere in this series: “If you have to restrict somebody’s rights, you must make sure that you are not using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Any restriction must be no greater than is needed to achieve the objective — this is called ‘proportionality’.”
An ASBO too vaguely drafted to secure a conviction. A caution interview over a ten-minute toilet visit. Years of police call-outs traced back to a single sneeze. Whoever copied that principle into the notebook in February 2009 had, whether they realised it yet or not, already written down the exact test the Council’s own conduct would go on to fail, case after case, for years afterward.
Reading the Council’s Own Rulebook Back to It
The same notebook contains equally careful research into the Adoption & Children Act 2002 and Stockport’s own published adoption support policy, copied out from the Council’s own website almost word for word: that adoption support “should be lifelong,” that a family “can request an assessment of your needs at any point,” and that the Council will “make sure that you receive regular information about the support and activities provided.” A follow-up note asks the practical question the Council’s own guidance doesn’t answer: does the local authority have a defined time frame within which a requested assessment must actually be completed and concluded?
That question carries real weight given everything else in this file. If the Parnells’ underlying, years-long need was counselling and adoption support for their daughters — an entitlement the Council’s own policy describes as lifelong and assessable “at any point” — then a family doing this level of legal homework was not behaving unreasonably. They were doing, unprompted, the work a competent authority should already have done for them.
A Paper Trail, Built by Hand
Elsewhere in the notebook is a formal complaint, addressed directly to a named officer, Martin Whiteside, manager of counter services at Stopford House, over a ban imposed on Mr Parnell entering the building. It reads as careful and procedural rather than confrontational: he asks Whiteside to escalate the complaint “to the next stage,” to formally receive and record it, to give it a reference number — and, pointedly, to actually tell him what that number is.
That last request is the tell. It’s the language of someone who had already learned, the hard way, that verbal assurances from Stockport Council did not survive contact with reality for even an hour, and that the only thing worth trusting afterward was a documented, numbered, trackable paper trail.
What the Notebook Proves
Together, these pages undercut two different narratives at once. They undercut any suggestion that Mr Parnell’s dealings with the Council were unreasonable or excessive, by showing a man who understood the relevant law at least as well as the institution enforcing it against him. And, in a security guard’s own words, they undercut the specific incident that provided the pretext for the ASBO that shaped years of what followed. Whatever else in this case remains contested, the notebook suggests the sneeze, at least, really was just a sneeze.
