The Romiley Gazette

9th September 2026

Vexatious? Moi?

How Stockport Council Built a Primary School on a Toxic Waste Dump — and Spent Twenty Years Trying to Stop Me Saying So

Sheila Oliver

Also by Sheila Oliver

Learning Law From a Lawless Council (Stockport) — the story of Michael Parnell

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the heavily protected, much loved land at Padden Brook — suffering almost daily degradation and dumping, while local politicians and council officers tell the same sort of lies about what has gone on, and do nothing in response to pleas from local residents for action.

Plus ça change.

Padden Brook, then and now

Contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Field
• Chapter 2: A Toxic Foundation
• Chapter 3: The Road That Kills
• Chapter 4: The Missing Millions
• Chapter 5: Built Too Small, On Purpose
• Chapter 6: The Playing Fields That Vanished
• Chapter 7: The Nine-Inch Ransom Strip, and the CPO That Never Faced an Inquiry
• Chapter 8: Vexatious
• Chapter 9: The Law
• Afterword: What Happens Now
• Appendix A: Key Documents Referenced
• Appendix B: Reproduced Correspondence (Facsimiles)
• Appendix C: Correspondence Transcripts

(Full first draft — all chapters, the Afterword and Appendices A–C. One passage in Chapter 3 is left for you to complete in your own words.)

Preface

I have been asking Stockport Council the same questions since 2006. I am still asking them now.

This book is not an opinion piece. Every figure in it comes from a council report, a Freedom of Information response, an Ombudsman letter, or an email sent by a council officer or councillor, with the date and reference number attached wherever I have it. I have kept these documents for twenty years because I learned early on that if you do not keep the paper, the Council will simply tell you the conversation never happened.

It began with a school. Stockport Council wanted to build a new primary school — Vale View, on Harcourt Street in North Reddish — on a site that had been a landfill and toxic waste dump, later grassed over and used as an informal recreation ground. I said, at the time, that this was a dangerous place to put four-year-olds. I was told the site was safe. I was told the traffic arrangements were safe. I was told the funding was under control. Almost none of it was true, and the Council’s own paperwork proves it.

What follows is not really a book about a school. It is a book about what happens to an ordinary resident who keeps asking questions a council would rather not answer — and about how a local authority came, eventually, to describe persistence itself as an offence.

Chapter 1: The Field

Before it was Vale View Primary School, the site on Harcourt Street was a tip.

For years it had been used, informally and without much comment, as a toxic waste dump. Over time it was grassed over and became a recreation ground — a sign at the site once said so in as many words: “Harcourt Street Recreation Ground.” Local children played on it. Reddish Angling Club fished nearby at Jackson’s Pond. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of accidental green space that turns up all over post-industrial Greater Manchester: not pretty, not celebrated, but used, and — on paper — protected.

Under Stockport’s own planning policy, the Unitary Development Plan, the land was allocated as Local Open Space and Green Chain. It was also, separately, identified as a Proposed School Site. Those two designations were never going to sit comfortably together, and the Council resolved the tension in the way that suited it best: it argued that because the new school would include public sports facilities, building over protected open space was acceptable. The open space would, in effect, be replaced by a slightly different kind of open space, on the same land, with a school on top of it.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not alleging in this chapter. I am not alleging that anyone sat down in 2005 and decided to knowingly poison children. I am alleging something in some ways more mundane and, in its way, more damning: that a council under pressure to find a school site, sitting on land it already owned, allowed the convenience of that ownership to override the site’s known history, its protected planning status, and — as later chapters will show — the safety of the children it would go on to educate there.

The recreation ground sign is a small detail, but I think it matters. I have a photograph of it, dated 8 July 2006, broken and lying discarded on wasteland. I do not believe it fell down by accident. A sign reading “Recreation Ground” is inconvenient evidence when you are trying to build a school on Local Open Space. I cannot prove who removed it. I can show you the photograph.

Chapter 2: A Toxic Foundation

What the Council knew, and when

The Council’s first response to concerns about contamination followed a pattern that recurs throughout this book: commission a limited investigation, get the answer you want, and treat any further inquiry as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a risk to be assessed.

A 2005 borehole and trial-pit location map, dated 13 December 2005, shows investigation points clustered away from the area where the school itself was eventually built. A 1940s map of the site — which I hold — shows old, infilled claypits directly beneath where the school now stands. Those claypits were never investigated for contamination.

The Council’s initial commissioned soil tests found no contamination. It was only later testing — carried out, according to a 2010 Manchester Evening News investigation by Jennifer Williams, to satisfy a public inquiry into a footpath diversion, not out of any proactive concern for the school itself — that found lead, arsenic and brown asbestos on the site. By that point a £2.2 million government grant had already been committed and spent. The money was moving before the ground had been honestly tested.

The Environment Agency’s involvement tells its own story. Under BS 10175, the Agency should have been informed of the intention to build on the site at the outset. It was not. When the Agency later emailed the Council advising that the application should not be decided on contamination grounds, that email was not passed to the Planning Committee. The Committee that approved this school did not have in front of it the one piece of correspondence most directly relevant to whether the site was safe to build on.

A chemist gave local residents an independent report on the contamination, free of charge. It was later proved correct. It was ignored by planning officers and by the great majority of committee members — with two exceptions, Councillor Harding and Councillor Bagnall, who I want to name here because they are the two people on that committee who, on the documentary record, got this right. The then local MP secured a parliamentary debate on the dangers of the site. The Council ignored that too.

By 2012 the figures being used to describe the site’s gassing had risen to up to 14.7% v/v CO2 — this on a site where the Council had told a 2006 public inquiry into a comparable local development (Persimmon Homes) that sites should not be built on above 1.5% v/v. I do not think it is unreasonable to ask how a threshold the Council itself argued for elsewhere came to be so distant from the reality of the ground its own school sits on.

The contractual sleight of hand

The Council required only £5 million of contamination cover from Vale View’s developers. I have set that figure against a case I know from elsewhere in Stockport: a market stallholder required to hold £5 million of cover for a market stall. The scale of the mismatch speaks for itself.

The Council did, at least, make the developers contractually liable for contamination costs — which means, as I noted to the Information Commissioner in 2012, that there will in time be a reckoning between developer and Council over who pays for what has already gone wrong. That is a dispute for lawyers. My concern has always been the much simpler one: was this ever a safe place to put a primary school, and did the Council know, at the point it chose to proceed, that the answer was more complicated than it was telling residents, parents, and its own planning committee.

A pattern, not an accident

This site does not sit in isolation. Comparable landfill and contamination problems have surfaced at other sites I am aware of, from a professional and personal standpoint, across this part of Greater Manchester: the former Trident Foams site at Offerton, and a former bleachworks site in Romiley where the developer did not remove toxic waste and residents were advised not to grow their own produce. A sister landfill-gas site elsewhere in Greater Manchester had to be evacuated in July 2012, on the same day I was, once again, told by the Council’s own solicitor that my questions about gas monitoring at Harcourt Street were vexatious. I had, by then, been asking the same landfill-gas question for around six years.

None of this proves, on its own, that Vale View is unsafe today. What it proves, at minimum, is a council with a documented history of underestimating contamination risk on its own development sites, and a documented pattern of treating residents who raise the alarm as the problem to be managed, rather than the risk itself.

Chapter 3: The Road That Kills

I said, before this school was ever built, that a four-year-old should not be expected to walk unaccompanied along Mill Lane. The Council told me, in writing, two days before it gave final approval in 2007, that this was not what its scheme required. I want that timing on the record: not a considered response arrived at after reflection, but a rebuttal issued at the last possible moment, with the decision already made in every sense but the formal vote.

The Council’s own highways officer had already told them otherwise. Nick Whelan warned in 2007 that the drop-off arrangements were inadequate, and that unaccompanied children walking on Mill Lane would be dangerous. That warning did not stop the scheme. It was not turned into a binding planning condition. It was converted instead into a commuted sum — money set aside to fix the problem later, at some unspecified point, rather than a requirement that the problem be fixed before children arrived. Mr Whelan himself reportedly did not discover quite how inadequate the drop-off area was until three days before the July 2007 planning decision.

The evidence that this was foreseeable was not hidden. I have pre-application photographs from 2005 and 2006 showing existing congestion on the surrounding roads, including an ambulance stuck in traffic near the site — submitted to the planning committee before it approved the scheme. An independent observer’s site visit on 13 August 2008 identified the same problems that would make headlines three years later: the blind turn at Mill Lane and Windmill Lane, and lanes too narrow for the traffic the school would generate. Seventy-eight per cent of consultation respondents raised traffic concerns.

The Council commissioned a Transport Assessment from Faber Maunsell, at a cost of £23,594.66, which concluded there would be no highway safety detriment. That conclusion did not survive contact with reality. Vale View opened in September 2011. Within weeks, the police were complaining about the dangerous traffic situation. By December 2011 the police had put those concerns to the Council in writing. A 2011 committee report went on to confirm that traffic and safety problems were ongoing, with the police still involved.

None of this was unforeseeable. It was foreseen — by residents, by an independent site visitor, by photographic evidence submitted before the decision was even made, and, on his own account, by the Council’s own highways officer. What was missing was not information. What was missing was a willingness to let that information change the outcome.

[Author’s note to self: paragraph to go here, in my own words, about why I know this danger isn’t theoretical.]

There is a reason I could not let this go, and it has nothing to do with paperwork. [SHEILA: your own words here.]

I say this not to ask for sympathy but to explain something about the word “vexatious.” It was used against me for correctly identifying a road danger to children. I already knew, in the worst way a parent can know anything, exactly what that danger costs. Being told my concern was an abuse of process, rather than the one thing in this whole affair I had absolute authority to speak on, is not merely wrong. It is the precise reason I have never been able to stop.

To claim that I am vexatious for correctly and persistently identifying a traffic danger to young children is beyond offensive.

Chapter 4: The Missing Millions

Follow the cost of this school across the Council’s own paperwork and you follow a number that does not sit still.

In October 2005 the figure was £5.5 million. By December 2005 it was £7.5 million. By February 2006 it was £8 million. By May 2008, in a formal Council report, it was £9,930,000 — a figure that itself contains a £90,000 arithmetic error, since the report’s own itemised components sum to £9,840,000, not the £9,930,000 stated as the total. By 2012 the figure being used was £10 million. The final cost is put, elsewhere in the record, as high as £11 million. This is not a school that went modestly over budget. It very nearly doubled.

The Council’s two Highlight Reports on the project tell the story most cleanly of all. In the report covering 15 May to 27 July 2006, available funding stood at £5.80 million against a projected cost of £8.20 million — a £2.40 million shortfall, recorded in the Council’s own document. By the report covering 15 April to 15 May 2008, both figures — available funding and projected cost — are recorded as exactly £9.94 million. The shortfall has become £0. I have asked, repeatedly and over many years, how that gap was closed. I have never received an answer. It was not, as claimed, resolved through land sales: the anticipated capital receipts from sites such as Fir Tree Primary School do not account for the movement on their own.

I first raised this formally as a council question in February 2008. I was promised a reply. By July 2008, with nothing received, I wrote to Jane Scullion. By November 2008, still nothing, I sent a registered-post reminder to Barry Khan. In December 2008 and February 2009 I asked again. The Council then refused to answer at all. On 2 March 2009 the Information Commissioner’s Office ordered the Council to comply within 20 working days. That order was also ignored. By April 2009 I formally documented, in a submission to Cllr Goddard for Public Question Time, a fourteen-month attempt to get a straight answer to a straightforward question: where did the extra £2.4 million come from.

I did eventually get an explanation of sorts — not through any formal Council process, but informally, in a car park, from Paul Carter, then the Liberal Democrat Executive Councillor for Finance. I do not think it is unreasonable to note that a multi-million-pound public funding gap, on a school built for children, deserved a better account than a conversation between two people beside their cars.

The anticipated borrowing for this project was £1.8 million. Actual borrowing reached £6.9 million. A pre-meeting agenda from 30 March 2007 records “obvious concern over funding” — months after I, and the public, had been told there was no problem — alongside a discussion of how much of that concern should make it into the Project Board’s Highlight Report, and an explicit note that it would not be a full Highlight report. The same document records a query about whether “pressure” could be put on the planning officer in charge, referred to as “SL,” to recommence the planning process. I would ask any reader to sit with what that sentence implies about the independence of the planning process on this scheme.

I did my own analysis in September 2007, using net book value ratios and the government’s own per-pupil build cost formula, and arrived at a reasonable cost for a school this size of £3.44–5.85 million — against the Council’s then-figure of “£8.5 million and rising.” A later, more precise calculation using the DfES/DCSF official 2006/07 cost multiplier of £10,372 per pupil, adjusted for Stockport’s regional factor and inflation, puts the reasonable benchmark cost at roughly £6.25–6.5 million for 525 pupils — against an actual cost of £8.5–9.94 million. For comparison, a contemporaneous 500-pupil school at Marple cost £7.2 million. In 2014, the Council itself built a 630-place primary school at Queen’s Road, on land it already owned, for £7.5 million — more places, for less money, than Vale View’s 525 places for up to £11 million.

Under Freedom of Information, the Council admitted it had no evidence that local parents did not want the school built at the alternative site, Fir Tree — the objection that had been used, at various points, to justify proceeding at Harcourt Street instead. Mark Weldon confirmed in February 2008 that costs above the stated £5.4 million were known to the Council as early as December 2005 — before residents, before the planning committee, and before me, were told otherwise.

Chapter 5: Built Too Small, On Purpose

The clearest single document in this entire case is an email dated 10 March 2006, from Chris Keebie to Andy MacKenzie, forwarded with the words: “I stress the need for confidentiality.” What it contained was a decision to cap the new school at “2.5 form of entry size… and no larger,” made with reference to the government’s own BB99 space standards, and kept deliberately away from the Project Board. The same document anticipated that “temporary accommodation” would be needed — in other words, the Council knew, in March 2006, before the school was built, that the capacity it had chosen would not be enough, and chose to build it anyway.

The Council’s own projected demand for the area was for up to 555–563 places. Vale View was built for 525. That is not a rounding error. It is a school built, on the Council’s own internal figuring, roughly 6–7% below the demand its own officers expected — a gap that widened as the years went on. By July 2012, an Executive Meeting agenda document admitted a 21.6% shortfall in school places across North Reddish. Within a few years, the area-wide shortfall required in the region of £80 million to be spent making up for it.

I raised the undersized-school concern formally at a council meeting in February 2008. I did not have the Keebie–MacKenzie email at the time. I had birth-rate data, which was already showing rising births in the catchment. I was not told the capacity decision had been made, confidentially, two years earlier, with the shortfall already anticipated. I was simply told the school would be big enough. It was not, and the Council’s own paperwork shows that it always expected it might not be.

I want to draw out what “confidential” is doing in that email. This was not commercially sensitive information in the way a tender price might be. It was a decision about how many school places children in North Reddish would have. Confidentiality, in this case, did not protect a legitimate commercial interest — it protected the Council from having to defend, at the time the decision was made, a choice it presumably knew would not survive public scrutiny.

Chapter 6: The Playing Fields That Vanished

Sport England objected to this development in 2006, after I wrote to them, on the straightforward grounds that it involved the loss of playing fields. That objection is a matter of public record, and so is its withdrawal in 2007 — but the withdrawal only happened once the Council put forward a package of replacement provision: on-site sports facilities at Harcourt Street itself, costing in the region of £625,000 (a pitch, a multi-use games area, changing rooms), plus additional, separate improvements promised offsite at Fir Tree Primary School.

Fir Tree Primary School was closed and disposed of by the Council in 2011.

I want that sentence to sit on its own, because it is the whole chapter in miniature. Part of the deal that persuaded Sport England to withdraw its objection to building over protected playing fields was offsite provision at a site the Council itself then closed down and sold.

In January 2016, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport wrote to me stating that sports provision had been delivered at Vale View and made available for community use. I telephoned the school directly in 2026 to check. There are no sporting facilities available for public or community use at the site. The only thing currently operating there is a paid, third-party holiday club.

So there is a compliance record, held centrally by government, stating that a planning obligation has been met. And there is the school itself, twenty years on, confirming by telephone that it has not. I do not know which of those two things DCMS believed when it wrote to me. I know which one is true, because I checked.

Chapter 7: The Nine-Inch Ransom Strip, and the CPO That Never Faced an Inquiry

In August 2009 I identified a nine-inch-wide strip of land, next to the school site, which the Council needed in order to complete its compulsory purchase and build the school at all. It belonged to the house next door. The owner, and the owner before him, had planted it with trees and bushes for thirty-eight years. The Council told lawyers acting for the Department for Children, Schools and Families that it did not know who owned this land.

I do not believe that. A strip of land visibly tended and planted by the same household for nearly four decades is not, in any ordinary sense, land of unknown ownership. I informed the owners what I had found, and told them what I believed the strip was worth to a Council that could not complete its compulsory purchase without it: in the region of £2 million. I say this now not to boast of the number, but to show what was actually at stake in the Council’s claimed ignorance. This was not a trivial gap in their paperwork. It was a gap that, honestly filled in, would have cost them millions and delayed the whole scheme. (The Council did eventually disclose correspondence covering this period, on 12 January 2010, but only after the Information Commissioner’s Office intervened — ICO case ref FS50205853.)

The CPO story does not end with the ransom strip. There was a second piece of land the Council needed — for a turning circle, part of the safety fix for the very drop-off problems described in Chapter 3 — which it also did not own. Here the Council’s choice was more deliberate still. Rather than compulsorily purchase that land too, it left it out of the CPO altogether. My reading of this, based on everything else in this book, is straightforward: including that land would have meant taking a larger piece of much-loved public open space, which would very likely have triggered a full public inquiry into the CPO — an inquiry the Council believed, correctly in my view, that it stood a strong chance of losing.

The result is a school that opened with a safety solution to its own traffic danger — the turning circle — sitting on land the Council still does not own, and therefore cannot build. It identified the problem itself, at the planning stage, and then structured its own compulsory purchase order to avoid the scrutiny that solving it properly would have brought.

There is a further, and to my mind more serious, allegation buried in the same paperwork. In seeking the CPO, the Council told the Secretary of State that it had received no objections from anyone who believed they had an interest in the land. It had, in fact, received a formal Statutory Objection from a houseowner who believed exactly that. A CPO that draws a Statutory Objection is supposed to go to public inquiry. This one did not — because, on the Council’s own submission to the Secretary of State, there was nothing to inquire into. I do not think that submission was accurate, and I do not think the consequence of that inaccuracy was accidental: it was a public inquiry the Council avoided having to hold.

Chapter 8: Vexatious

Every thread in this book — the contamination, the road, the money, the undersized school, the playing fields, the CPO — passes, eventually, through the same word: vexatious.

It was used by the Council’s own solicitor, repeatedly, across years, to stop questions being put to committee meetings at all: in June 2012, when a third question about Vale View was blocked before it reached the Executive; again in November and December 2012, when the Leader personally agreed that further questions related to matters “previously deemed vexatious” and kept them off the agenda too. It was used by the Information Commissioner’s Office, which in January 2012 confirmed that one of my requests to the Council had formally been found vexatious by decision notice (case ref RCC0429756) — a finding I did not appeal to the Information Tribunal, a fact I set out here because this book is not interested in only telling the parts of the story that are comfortable. It was used, more casually but no less pointedly, by a councillor who told me to my face that I had been branded, in his words, “Vexatious With Knobs On.”

I want to be honest about what that word does. It does not answer a question. It does not engage with a figure, a date, or a document. It reclassifies the person asking as the problem, so that the actual content of what they are asking never has to be addressed at all. I have shown, across seven chapters, that when the actual content was addressed — when a chemist gave a free contamination report, when a highways officer warned about the drop-off, when a Highlight Report recorded a £2.4 million funding gap — the answer was very often that I was right. “Vexatious” is not a finding about my conduct. It is what a council says instead of answering.

I connected this pattern to the language of the Fraud Act 2006 myself, in writing, in an email dated 31 August 2009: fraud by false representation, by failing to disclose information, and by abuse of position, none of which require an actual loss to have occurred — only the intent. I set that definition against the Harcourt Street funding gap, and against the case of Michael Parnell, in the same email, to the Council’s own Corporate Complaints Manager. I was not vague about what I believed. I have never been vague about what I believed. That, I suspect, is closer to the real offence I am accused of than anything in a decision notice.

Chapter 9: The Law

I am not a lawyer, and nothing in this chapter is legal advice. It is a plain account of the legal ground this story touches, so that a reader — or a regulator, or a journalist — can see where to look next.

Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Environmental Information Regulations 2004. This is the clearest ground of all. Public authorities have a statutory duty to respond to requests within twenty working days, and the Information Commissioner has the power to order compliance where they don’t. Across this book I have shown repeated late responses, repeated refusals, and — on at least one occasion, in 2009 — an ICO compliance order that was simply not obeyed. Persistent non-compliance with an ICO decision notice can, in principle, be certified to the High Court as contempt.

The Acquisition of Land Act 1981. A valid Statutory Objection to a compulsory purchase order is supposed to trigger a public local inquiry. If the Council told the Secretary of State that no such objection had been received, when one had, that is a misrepresentation at the heart of a statutory process — not an administrative slip.

Misconduct in Public Office. This common-law offence is the one that would, in principle, cover a sustained pattern of a public official knowingly misleading a minister, or withholding information for improper purposes. It carries a high threshold — the conduct must be serious, and either dishonest or a wilful neglect of duty — and it is a matter for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to establish, not something documents alone can prove.

The Localism Act 2011 and the councillor Code of Conduct. Below the criminal threshold sits the standards regime: the requirement that councillors act honestly and do not bring their office into disrepute. This is the ground my Standards Committee complaints, described in earlier chapters, were actually made on.

The Fraud Act 2006. I invoked this myself, in writing, in 2009, and I want to be precise about what it requires. False representation, failure to disclose information, and abuse of position all require dishonesty and an intent to make a gain or cause a loss — intent being the element hardest to prove from paperwork alone. That is very likely why what I have set out in this book has remained an allegation, rather than a prosecution.

The Environmental Protection Act 1990 (Part IIA) and the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. These set out the statutory duties around identifying and remediating contaminated land, and a local authority’s duties as a landowner and developer. They are the framework against which the contamination chapter of this book should be read.

The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007. I want to treat this one differently from the rest, because it is not, and cannot be, a description of anything that has already happened. It only becomes a live legal question after a death caused by a gross breach of an organisation’s duty of care. My reference elsewhere in this book to the turning circle land — a safety fix the Council identified itself and then structured its own CPO to avoid delivering — is a warning about a foreseeable future risk, not a claim that a crime under this Act has occurred. I think that distinction matters, and I want it to be clear that I am making it deliberately.

A final, practical note, for anyone publishing something like this: a book naming individuals and making allegations of this seriousness carries real exposure under the Defamation Act 2013, however well-documented the author believes it to be. Independent legal review before publication is not a sign of weak sourcing. It is standard practice, and it protects the author as much as anyone named in the text.

Afterword: What Happens Now

I filed a Freedom of Information request with the Department for Education, received on 29 August 2026, asking for a specific DfES permission dated 15 December 2004 relating to the “Reddish North allocation.” As I write this, it remains unanswered.

Twenty years is a long time to ask the same questions. I am not finished asking them. This book is not a conclusion. It is the documentary record, assembled in one place for the first time, of a school built on ground that was never honestly tested, on a road the Council’s own officer warned was unsafe, funded by money that does not add up on the Council’s own reports, sized against demand the Council’s own officers knew was too high, promised playing fields that no longer exist, and completed via a compulsory purchase order that avoided the one process — a public inquiry — that might have caught all of it at the time.

Every one of those sentences is checkable. That has always been the point.

Appendix A: Key Documents Referenced

This is not a complete list of the archive — it is a index of the documents and references cited by chapter, so that any claim in this book can be checked against its source.

Chapter 1 — The Field – Photograph of broken “Harcourt Street Recreation Ground” sign, dated 8 July 2006 – Stockport Unitary Development Plan: Local Open Space / Green Chain and Proposed School Site designations

Chapter 2 — A Toxic Foundation – Borehole/trial-pit location map, GMGU, 13 December 2005 – 1940s map showing infilled claypits beneath the school building footprint – Manchester Evening News investigation, Jennifer Williams, 2010 – Independent (unpaid) chemist’s contamination report, and its later vindication – Tender specification document, NPS Group, Project E000C1030, September 2008 – DCSF correspondence re asbestos in schools, ref 2010/0017078 (reply re Diana Johnson MP) – DCSF correspondence re building schools on toxic waste land, ref 2008/0034126 (reply re Ed Balls MP)

Chapter 3 — The Road That Kills – Nick Whelan (Head of Highways), 2007 warnings on drop-off arrangements – Pre-application photographs, 2005–2006, including ambulance stuck in traffic – Independent site visit report, 13 August 2008 – Faber Maunsell Transport Assessment (£23,594.66) – Police correspondence, December 2011

Chapter 4 — The Missing Millions – Council report, 22 March 2008 (cost breakdown; £90,000 internal arithmetic discrepancy) – Highlight Reports: 15 May–27 July 2006 and 15 April–15 May 2008 – Public Question Time submission to Cllr Goddard, 16 April 2009 – ICO compliance order, 2 March 2009 – 30 March 2007 pre-meeting agenda (“obvious concern over funding”; reference to “SL”)

Chapter 5 — Built Too Small, On Purpose – Chris Keebie to Andy MacKenzie email, 10 March 2006 (“I stress the need for confidentiality”) – July 2012 Executive Meeting agenda document (21.6% shortfall)

Chapter 6 — The Playing Fields That Vanished – Sport England objection (2006) and withdrawal (2007) correspondence – DCMS letter, January 2016 – 2026 telephone enquiry to Vale View Primary School

Chapter 7 — The Nine-Inch Ransom Strip – Correspondence establishing the 38-year planted strip and its ownership, August 2009 – Council submission to the Secretary of State regarding CPO objections – WhatDoTheyKnow request: “turning circle toxic waste dump” – ICO case ref FS50205853 (Michael Warburton persuaded Council to disclose CPO-period correspondence, 12 Jan 2010)

Chapter 8 — Vexatious – Letters of 21 June 2012 and 20 December 2012 (questions blocked as vexatious) – ICO decision notice correspondence, case ref RCC0429756, January 2012 – ICO case ref FS50070188 (complaint re pre-executive meeting minutes; referenced in Council FOI response ref FOI 884) – ICO case ref FS50247042 (referenced alongside FS50205853, 2009 correspondence) – Council FOI response ref 1202, 21 August 2008 (DCSF objection-letter mailings; one covering letter withheld under s.42 FOIA legal privilege) – Email to Anwar Majothi, 31 August 2009 (Fraud Act 2006)

Afterword – DfE FOI request, ref 2026-0086605, received 29 August 2026

Appendix B: Reproduced Correspondence (Facsimiles)

Letter, 21 June 2012 — “for Democratic Services Manager,” confirming that a third question about Vale View Primary School had again been advised by the Council Solicitor to be vexatious, and was therefore not put to the meeting.

Letter dated 21 June 2012

Letter, 20 December 2012 — Jonathan Vali, Democratic Services, confirming that for the 17 December 2012 Executive Meeting Public Question Time, the Leader of the Council agreed that two questions related to matters previously deemed vexatious, so neither was put to the meeting.

Letter dated 20 December 2012

Appendix C: Correspondence Transcripts

The following are reproduced in full from my own files: my own emails and letters, and the responses sent to me by public officials in their official capacities. I have removed one home address on personal-safety grounds; everything else appears as received or sent.

C1. The Local Government Ombudsman and Councillor Porgess (undated notes)

As one would expect, Chris Upjohn at the Ombudsman Service wanted a quiet life — like the rest of his colleagues. He was given access to all the information on this site regarding the toxic waste dump school and was happy that nothing has been done wrong by Stockport Council.

Nothing wrong then — children will be run over, many will have disabilities due to mesothelioma and an early death, local residents have to carry new furniture for their homes circa a quarter of a mile, ambulance crews have no access to collapsed residents, the school is not big enough for the children who need to go there, the funding is circa £5 million adrift, there are no sporting facilities to replace the lost playing fields.

It is “frivolous” to complain about a member who used his professional credentials from the Royal Society of Chemistry to mislead local residents in the Stockport Express that a lethal former toxic waste dump was, in fact, completely safe — Councillor Paul Victor Kraus Porgess.

Bus. email: cllr.paul.porgess@stockport.gov.uk

Councillor Porgess expressed huge concerns about another sister site, Jacksons Brickyard at Adswood, where the Council wanted to block development — but none at all (quite the opposite) at the lethal primary school site where the Council stood to financially benefit from development.

C2. Department for Children, Schools and Families — asbestos in schools (ref 2010/0017078)

Reply to Sheila Oliver’s email of 2 March, addressed to Diana Johnson, about asbestos issues in schools.

Partnerships for Schools (PfS) are now responsible for the delivery of the government’s schools capital investment programme. I have therefore forwarded your email to PfS and asked them to respond to you directly.

— Amy Robinson, Public Communications Unit, DCSF

C3. Department for Children, Schools and Families — building schools on toxic waste land (ref 2008/0034126)

Reply to Sheila Oliver’s email of 17 April, addressed to Ed Balls.

Under health and safety legislation it is for the local authority to have a risk assessment conducted at the schools you mention in your email, to ensure the health and safety of the staff, pupils and visitors and put measures in place to minimise any known risks. You may, therefore, like to raise your concerns with Stockport Local Authority.

Education Ministers do not have any powers to influence planning matters which are for the local planning authority to determine.

— Adrian Thompson, Public Communications Unit, DCSF

C4. Jane Scullion — Standards process, and the “rogue” complaint (22 July 2008)

Jane Scullion, Council:

Officers cannot deal directly with complaints about councillors. If you wish to make a complaint about the conduct of a particular member please put it in writing to me indicating which part of the Code you think has been breached and providing any relevant evidence.

Sheila Oliver, 22 July 2008, “official complaint,” cc John Schultz, Leader:

Councillor Weldon incorrectly stated that it was one “rogue” planning committee member who drew attention to the “shoddy” design of the proposed school at Harcourt Street. Quite a few of the councillors on that committee mentioned the low quality design of the school and in particular the tin roof. The design is to be amended as a result.

I also note the High Risk status in the Harcourt Street Risk Register of further contamination work needing to be carried out, which means Councillor Harding was 100% correct to make the contamination comments he did at that meeting. It is surely the other members of the committee who were “rogue,” being prepared as they were to put children’s lives at risk from inadequate contamination investigations.

C5. HSE and the Watts Group correspondence (July 2009)

Polly Tomlinson, HM Principal Inspector of Health & Safety, 11 July 2009:

I am afraid that I cannot assist you any further in this matter and therefore have no advice to offer you.

Sheila Oliver, to Polly Tomlinson, 11 July 2009:

Stockport Council is illegally refusing all FOI responses on the subject, as it has done for circa three out of the past four years… I have to suspect corruption with all that has gone on with Stockport Council… These are children’s lives that are at stake.

Rebecca Fairclough, Watts Group PLC, 3 July 2009:

It is with regret that we are unable to produce the required documentation without prior authorisation from the Council… we reserve the right to spend time to go through our files to remove all sensitive company information… any time involved will be charged at £75.00 per hour.

C6. The 84-hour redaction claim, and the ICO communications FOI (ref FOI 884)

After I showed up the LibDems in Parliament over their claims to respect FOI, within hours they let me see the documents originally refused to me by Andrew Webb, who tried to claim there were so many secrets in the building of a new primary school that it would take a council officer 84 hours to “redact” them. That man is a liar.

Council FOI response, ref FOI 884:

The Council does not hold any recorded information in relation to the ICO contacting the Council on this issue [beyond] two letters from the ICO to the Council and one letter from the Council to the ICO in relation to ICO case reference FS50070188, which related to your complaint to the ICO regarding pre-executive meeting minutes.

C7. The “ransom strip” (28 August 2009, to Michael Warburton, ICO)

A big piece has fallen in place. I got my second massive ban when I started to ask about the compulsory purchase documents. What they had to stop me seeing is that there is a 9 inch wide “ransom strip” which the Council needs to CPO in order to build the school. They can’t build it without this strip. It belongs to a house next door to where the school is going. The Council has told Department for Schools and Families lawyers that they don’t know who owns the land. It is obvious they know who owns the land and they haven’t even contacted the houseowner, who with the previous owner has planted up this strip with trees and bushes over the past 38 years.

So, they had to stop me finding out about this ransom strip. I have informed the owners, who most certainly don’t want the school to be built, and told them to hold out for £2 million for this 9 inch wide strip.

C8. ICO — the vexatious decision and the CPO disclosure (Michael Warburton / Rachael Cragg correspondence, Jan 2012)

Sheila Oliver, to ICO casework, 22 January 2012:

Refer this up to the Board. Cover yourself. Note the blocked ventilation shafts in the attached newspaper article. We might have another Aberfan here.

Also, the Council lied about the contamination — they knew it was contaminated, I knew it was contaminated… The police have serious concerns about the traffic situation around the school… The Council admitted at planning the arrangements were inadequate. They came up with a solution for a turning circle, but they don’t own the land.

An ambulance crew couldn’t reach a lady in her 80s who fell in her home. I pointed out to the Council this emergency services access problem they were creating.

Rachael Cragg, ICO, 16 January 2012:

The Commissioner found that your request to Stockport Council was vexatious. This was determined via a decision notice; if you were unhappy with that decision you should have appealed to the Information Tribunal. There is no further action we can take with regards this decision.

Michael Warburton, ICO, 24 January 2012 (ref FS50205853):

On 12 January 2010 I was finally able to persuade the council to disclose to you copies of correspondence concerning the Harcourt Street CPO during a specific time period.

C9. The village green claim and the CPO’s legal preconditions (John Hill, March–April 2008)

Sheila Oliver to John Hill, Principal Conveyancer and Compulsory Purchase Officer, 29 March 2008:

This email is to officially inform you that I shall be claiming a village green along the Poplar Tree stretch of the land at Mill Lane, North Reddish, Stockport. I believe the owner of the land is not known following my inquiries at the Land Registry. I have massive local support for this claim.

Under the legislation quoted to the Executive Committee on 10th March 2008 the compulsory purchase cannot go ahead anyway if remediation measures are outstanding. The Environment Agency had heard nothing from Stockport Council regarding the further conditions they imposed as of the end of February… there are financial issues which are not clear, which also casts doubt on whether the CPO process can continue.

John Hill, 3 April 2007:

I think it would be premature for any action to be taken of the type described even if such action was necessary bearing in mind that the Council has yet to make a compulsory purchase order in respect of any land that may be needed to facilitate the development of the proposed School.

C10. Misleading the Secretary of State — the CPO objections (ref 1202, 21 August 2008)

The Council sent the letters of objection to the DCSF in two separate mailings… The second covering letter contains information which we consider to be subject to legal professional privilege… we have provided you with a redacted version of the covering letter with legally privileged information removed.

— Claire Naven, Data Protection & Freedom of Information Officer, Stockport MBC

Sheila Oliver’s own account: The Council misled the Secretary of State, saying they had received no objections from anyone who thought they had an interest in the land. They had received a Statutory Objection from a houseowner who felt he had had an interest in the land for decades. This meant no public inquiry was held into the compulsory purchase order.

C11. Mark Weldon on FOI responsibility (11 March 2008)

Sheila Oliver to the FOI Officer, cc Cllr Mark Weldon, 11 March 2008:

I notice you persist in your illegal action in withholding the Harcourt Street CPO background documents… Given today’s press questioning and the public interest in the story, unless I am allowed to view all the documents by the end of this week, this matter shall be brought up in the local press.

Cllr Mark Weldon, 11 March 2008:

Freedom of information decisions are not part of the political arena. FOI is therefore not my “area of responsibility.”

C12. The turning circle and the CPO exclusion

The Council doesn’t own the land for the turning circle. They would have to compulsory purchase it. They could have included this land in the compulsory purchase order but they made a deliberate decision to exclude it. It would have led to a public inquiry given the size of the public open space to be taken.

When the first child dies in a road accident there, my belief is there are very strong grounds for corporate manslaughter charges to be brought against the Chief Executive.