2nd September 2026
Part 13 of an investigation into Stockport Council’s handling of Michael Parnell, 2010–2011
Two kinds of document sit side by side in this batch. One is intensely personal: a curfew schedule, an electronic tag, a handwritten note asking, on Christmas Day, to be let off it for a few hours. The other is a matter of national record: Greater Manchester Police’s own admissions, years apart, that the majority of crimes reported to it were never properly investigated at all. Read together, they raise a question this series keeps circling back to in different forms: what, exactly, was being prioritised, and at whose expense?
Free From Midnight to 8am
The Electronic Monitoring Information Form, issued from Minshull Street Crown Court in September 2009, sets out Mr Parnell’s curfew requirement in a plain table. Monday through Sunday, without exception, he was required to be at his curfew address from 08:00 until 23:59 — and again, confusingly on the form itself, listed as continuing from 00:00 to 20:00. Read either way, the effective result was a curfew covering all but a handful of overnight hours, seven days a week, with no day off. He couldn’t visit his dentist or his elderly mum on Christmas Day.
The accompanying G4S monitoring agreement spells out what that meant in practice: a personal identification device worn on his body 24 hours a day; unannounced visits and phone calls at any time during curfew hours “for the purpose of investigating in the case of a suspected violation”; an obligation to keep a continuous electricity supply running for the monitoring equipment; and a warning that any attempted removal or tampering would be treated as a breach and reported back to the court for re-sentencing. He complained that the tag wasn’t PAT tested and therefore would invalidate his home insurance. No-one listened.
A Request, Written on Christmas Day
Among these documents is a short, handwritten note in red ink: “Following my request on the 24th December I withdraw consent to be monitored with the electronic tag attached to my person for the 25th December.” It is countersigned by a field monitoring officer, Royston Dixon, timestamped 19:42 on 26 December — the day after Christmas.
There is no need to editorialise this one. A man made a request, on Christmas Eve, not to be electronically tagged on Christmas Day. The formal record of that request being received and logged was made the day after Christmas had already passed. Whatever the outcome of the request itself, the document captures, better than any commentary could, what living under this level of monitoring actually looked like for one ordinary holiday.
Stopped Anyway
A separate Greater Manchester Police stop/search form shows that even alongside round-the-clock electronic monitoring, Mr Parnell was still being stopped in the street. The recorded reason for the stop: he was “dressed in [a] hi-vis top” near Mill Brook. The form notes explicitly that no search was carried out — “not searched” is written directly in the grounds-for-search box. He was stopped, in other words, for what he was wearing, while already electronically tagged and curfewed, and the encounter itself produced nothing.
What the Force Was Doing With Its Time Instead
Set against all of this are two pieces of GMP’s own public record. In September 2013, the Daily Mirror reported Chief Constable Sir Peter Fahy’s own admission that Greater Manchester Police “ignore 60% of crimes” — more than 106,000 offences shelved in a single year, victims handed a crime number for insurance purposes and nothing more, with Fahy telling reporters the force had to prioritise “a group of active, persistent offenders” and could pursue only around 40% of crimes at any time. A Labour MP, Graham Stringer, called it a policy bound to erode public confidence.
A year later, in November 2014, the Manchester Evening News reported a watchdog inspection finding GMP was “failing sex victims,” citing a shortage of properly trained staff in its Serious Sexual Offences Unit and “inconsistencies” in how such crimes were investigated. Fahy’s own response pointed to £134 million in required savings and the loss of 2,700 jobs as the underlying pressure.
Neither article mentions Mr Parnell. They don’t need to. They establish, in the force’s own words and its own watchdog’s findings, that resources were demonstrably scarce, that serious crimes — including sexual offences — were going under-resourced as a direct and admitted consequence, and that this was happening across the same years documented elsewhere in this series, in which police time was also being spent on stop-searches over a hi-vis vest and round-the-clock curfew enforcement against a single, elderly, previously-convicted-then-acquitted man.
The Question This Leaves Standing
None of this proves that any specific hour spent monitoring Mr Parnell was an hour stolen from a sexual offences investigation. Policing resourcing doesn’t move that simply. But it does mean the question Ms Oliver put to Stepping Hill Area Committee back in 2008 — was this a productive use of police time — was not a rhetorical flourish. It was, on the force’s own later admissions, a genuinely open question about priorities that Greater Manchester Police was simultaneously answering, in public, in exactly the way her question implied it might: by conceding that most crime went uninvestigated, and that victims of serious sexual offences were among those being let down.
