Part 11 of an investigation into Stockport Council’s handling of Michael Parnell, 2010–2011
Four letters, spanning 2009 to 2012, from Andrew Stunell — Liberal Democrat MP for Hazel Grove, and, before that, a Stockport councillor himself for six years — tell a consistent story. Not one of hostility exactly, but one of managing a problem’s optics rather than addressing what caused it.
A Councillor Turned MP, Writing About His Old Council
It’s worth stating plainly: before he was Mr Parnell’s MP, Andrew Stunell had served for six years on the very council whose conduct is at the centre of this case, and he sat for a party — the Liberal Democrats — that ran Stockport throughout most of the period this series covers. That doesn’t automatically compromise anything he wrote. But it is relevant context for reading what he actually did, or didn’t do, with the concerns Ms Oliver and Mr Parnell brought to him.
“Contain Your Insatiable Curiosity”
In a letter dated 29 July 2009, responding to Ms Oliver’s own enquiries — about his expenses, and about her request to see correspondence relating to Mr Parnell — Stunell was unambiguous. He would not accept a letter of authorisation from Mr Parnell to release material to her, full stop. On the substance of her questions about his own conduct and expenditure, his closing line was pointed: she now had “all the information that any rational enquirer could need” and would “simply have to contain your insatiable curiosity as best you can.”
The same letter contains something more telling than the rebuff itself. Stunell tells Ms Oliver he looks forward to hearing reports of her “street surgeries,” and adds that if she could persuade Mr Parnell to attend those instead of the Town Hall, she would be doing “everybody, including Mr Parnell, a great favour.” Three years before the “red rag to a bull” letter below, the underlying approach was already set: redirect Mr Parnell away from the building, rather than resolve why he kept needing to go there.
What He Actually Needed
A 2010 letter to Mr Parnell directly shows what “why he kept needing to go there” actually meant. Stunell confirms that a factual error — his daughter’s birth date, wrongly recorded — had finally been corrected, following referral to the Local Government Ombudsman. That’s a small, telling detail on its own: a basic administrative fact took Ombudsman-level escalation to fix.
The same letter goes on to ask whether Mr Parnell had “been able to persuade either of your daughters to register for Job Seeker’s Allowance, or to get their GP to refer them for support from Adult Mental Health Services,” adding: “the sooner they do so, the better the situation at home will be.” Read alongside what Ms Oliver has said elsewhere in this series — that Mr Parnell’s core, recurring need was counselling support for his troubled daughters, support he was legally entitled to seek on their behalf — this letter confirms the substance of the underlying problem in the MP’s own words. It also puts the responsibility for solving it back onto the family, rather than onto the statutory services that were supposed to provide it.
“A Red Rag to a Bull”
By April 2012, the pattern had hardened into policy. Following a meeting with Mr Parnell, Stunell wrote to say he had raised “a number of the difficulties” with the Council and asked for “a full response,” while cautioning that “none of these matters are going to be easily resolved.” The operative instruction, though, wasn’t about resolution — it was about access: “I would urge you as strongly as possible not to attend the Council’s offices under any circumstances as this seems to be a red rag to a bull as far as they are concerned. There is no need to approach the Town Hall for any business, and if you wish my office to act as a post box for anything you wish to send to them please don’t hesitate to do so.”
That is a remarkable admission on its own terms. An MP is telling a constituent, in writing, that the council he needs help from will react badly simply to his presence — and that the appropriate response is for the constituent to stop appearing, not for the council to stop reacting badly. The “post box” offer, however well-intentioned, formalised the exclusion this series has already documented in painstaking detail: Mr Parnell’s presence in a public building, on legitimate business, treated by the authority itself as a provocation to be managed rather than a right to be accommodated.
After Stunell
Andrew Stunell died in April 2024, having sat in the House of Lords since standing down as an MP in 2015. Hazel Grove’s current MP, Lisa Smart, worked in his constituency office from 2012 onward — spanning, in other words, exactly the period covered by these letters. Ms Oliver says that on the occasions she has raised Mr Parnell’s case with her since, Ms Smart’s response has been to roll her eyes and walk away. That is Ms Oliver’s account of those exchanges, not something this series can independently verify, but it’s included here because — true or not as a description of Ms Smart’s state of mind — it reflects how thoroughly Ms Oliver believes this case has been absorbed into local political memory as a nuisance to be managed, rather than a case to be resolved. Fourteen years after the first of these letters, that would be a strikingly durable outcome for a family’s unmet legal right to still be waiting on.
Andrew Stunell himself made a nuisance call to Mr Parnell asking him to vote LibDem.
Councillor Angela Clark was told about this case at the outset, before she became a councillor and was volunteering in Stunell’s constituency office. She also rolled her eyes and walked off when I tried to raise his case with her.
Above is councillor Clark who has brought grass into a grass-free area to pretend to have dug it up for a photo op.
