People who would rather I stopped asking questions have a favourite word for what I do: vexatious. It’s a useful word for them, because it lets them dismiss the question without answering it. It is also, on the evidence in this book, completely wrong.

Nothing in these pages is hindsight. I am not a historian picking over a scheme’s corpse years after the event, finding fault with the benefit of everything that has since gone wrong. Every question in this book was asked while it was still live, still answerable, and still capable of being put right — at the exact moment someone paid to know the answer should have known it.

When I asked, in 2012, why there was still no written funding documentation for a scheme already years into its life, the Council’s own reply told me a finalised cost estimate was due “within the next few months.” I wasn’t asking about the past. I was asking about now, and the Council’s own answer confirmed there wasn’t yet a “then” to look back on.

When I asked why the Corderoy group had been chosen to advise on the bypass’s funding, the payments to Corderoy were still being made. When I raised concerns about NPS Stockport’s competence on land and property matters, they were still being paid for exactly that work, on this route, at the time. When I complained that goods were being stored in the unauthorised, sectioned-off extension of the Tesco Portwood store, blocking its fire exits, that was not an archival curiosity — it was a live safety hazard, in a trading shop, that somebody could have walked into that same week.

This matters because the people whose actual job it was to ask these questions had every advantage I didn’t. They had the agenda papers before the meeting, not obtained months later through a Freedom of Information request. They had officers to brief them, and expenses to attend site visits I paid for myself. They had, in the most literal sense, the same documents in front of them that I did — often the same documents I was quoting back to them.

I can offer one exchange I can’t produce a transcript for, though people who were in the room still remember it. In a full Council meeting, I asked the then Council Leader, Sue Derbyshire, in a public question, why the cost of the bypass had risen from £400 million to £600 million. She didn’t answer the question. She turned to the room and asked, not quite under her breath, “Where does Mrs Oliver get these ridiculous figures from?” I told her: from the agenda papers for that very meeting, and from the Executive meeting three days before it — papers she should have read before she stood up to lead the discussion they were part of.

That, in miniature, is the whole case this book makes. Not that a difficult project went wrong, which happens. But that the people responsible for it had the same paperwork I did, and either didn’t read it, didn’t understand it, or read it and hoped nobody outside the room would notice the questions it raised. I noticed. I am not the one who should have had to.

Part One: The Road That Was Promised

Chapter One: Eighty Years in the Making

The road that opened in October 2018 as the A555 Manchester Airport Relief Road had been, in one form or another, on the drawing board for the best part of a century. Its most recent formal ancestor, the “A6(M) Stockport North-South Bypass” — also called the Hazel Grove Diversion — dated from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its statutory Highways Act orders sat on the books, unused, for roughly twenty-five years before finally being revoked in early 2014. A road planned in one era was formally abandoned in another, having achieved nothing in between except keeping a line reserved on a map.

What replaced it was SEMMMS — the South East Manchester Multi-Modal Strategy — adopted as policy in 2001, and with it a new road under a new name, and a cost that began modestly and did not stay that way.

The earliest figures put the scheme at around £170 million. By the exhibitions of November and December 2003, Council officers were quoting £300-400 million. By August 2004, the figure being sent to government in twenty boxes of supporting evidence was £400 million. By February 2006, at 2005 prices, it was £432 million — a rise Council correspondence attributed to “the revised start date,” as though a delay, on its own, explained a jump of tens of millions of pounds. A further, disputed figure of £511 million surfaces in Council correspondence, one the Council itself once asked me to help source. At its most extreme, under a Private Finance Initiative funding model that was eventually abandoned as too expensive before being partially resurrected, the figure touched £1 billion. By the 2012-13 business case it had come back down to £290 million. Today, the scheme — which now also includes diverting the fuel pipeline that supplies Manchester Airport — is quoted at £350 million.

Put those numbers in a line and what you have is not a cost estimate that firmed up as the project matured, which is what is supposed to happen. What you have is a figure that moved by hundreds of millions of pounds, repeatedly, in both directions, over two decades, without ever settling — right up to and past the point at which contracts were let and concrete was poured.

It is also worth being clear about which government presided over the scheme’s decisive years. The critical funding decisions — the 2011 Autumn Statement release, the courting of Treasury ministers, the final push that got the scheme moving toward construction — were made between 2010 and 2015, under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government. The politicians who feature most prominently in the chapters that follow, including a sitting Chief Secretary to the Treasury, were Coalition figures making Coalition-era decisions. That context matters for understanding who was in the room when the choices that shaped this scheme’s cost and design were actually made.

Chapter Two: The Money Trail

A road does not get built on hope. It gets built on funding settlements, and the A555’s funding history is a story of near-misses, abandoned schemes, and one genuinely alarming admission.

The scheme was not included in the Chancellor’s 2010 spending reviews. The 2011 Autumn Statement released £165 million of the £290 million the 2012-13 business case said was needed. Along the way, several funding routes were tried and dropped: Chinese investment, abandoned over currency risk; the Greater Manchester Pension Fund, also dropped. And then there was “Earn Back” — a form of Tax Increment Financing under which the scheme would, in theory, pay for itself out of thirty years of future rateable-value growth, with “indications” at the time of £500 million by 2020 and £700 million after that.

Tax Increment Financing has a real-world track record, and it is not a good one. A 2018 Lincoln Institute of Land Policy review by Professor David Merriman of the University of Illinois at Chicago, examining more than thirty separate studies of TIF schemes across the United States over several decades, concluded plainly that “in most cases, TIF has not accomplished the goal of promoting economic development.” In Chicago alone, some $660 million — nearly a third of the entire city’s property tax revenue — sat inside TIF districts, shielded from ordinary budget scrutiny. A scheme built on the promise of future growth that may never materialise, with the funds it does generate hidden from the people paying for it, is not a footnote. It is precisely the mechanism the SEMMMS funding proposal reached for.

This is worth separating from a related but distinct mechanism used elsewhere in Greater Manchester: the “earnback” arrangement under the Greater Manchester City Deal, in which growth in GVA and business rates across the whole combined authority area is returned to Greater Manchester over decades — up to roughly £900 million over thirty years under the revised post-2014 deal. That is a genuine, functioning regional funding tool, and it is fair to note it as such. But it is not the same thing as earmarking one scheme’s own future tax growth to pay for itself, which is what “Earn Back”/TIF, as pitched for this road, actually was. The label was borrowed from a tool with a real success story elsewhere in the region; the mechanism itself was the one with the discredited American track record.

Away from the headline figures, the day-to-day funding correspondence tells its own story. A letter from Dave Colbert, 4NW’s Regional Transport Advisor, sets out how the North West’s January 2006 Regional Funding Advice included £33.8 million toward preparation costs for the three SEMMMS relief roads. PFI funding fell through. In November 2008 the Department for Transport offered £165 million — half the cost — conditional on regional match-funding that then failed to materialise, because the region’s transport programme was already over-committed. In February 2009, a further £17 million was allocated toward preparation and land costs, pending yet another review.

And through it all, the paper trail on the money itself stayed thin. A February 2012 Freedom of Information response confirmed that £0.992 million of the scheme’s non-cash development-cost budget went unspent in 2011-12, with the finalised cost estimate still described as due “within the next few months.” A separate response the same month confirmed that no written funding documentation existed for the scheme at all. Over a million pounds had been spent across two years with no business case in place — in the same period the town had no public toilets, fewer lollipop patrols and flowerbeds, and cuts to transport for disabled children.

By December 2012, a further Freedom of Information response admitted there was no single document tracking how the scheme’s costs had changed — costs were, in the Council’s words, kept “under continuous review.” The same response listed a string of specification cuts made along the way — removed hard strips, reduced lighting, smaller junctions, a shared cycle and pedestrian path narrowed from three metres to two and a half, revised bridge specifications — collectively claimed to have saved £100 million. Whether those cuts were sound engineering economy or corners quietly shaved off a scheme whose costs had spiralled is a judgement this book leaves the reader to make, armed with what actually changed.

Chapter Three: The Consultants

Every large public scheme accumulates consultants. What matters is who they are, what they were paid, and whether anyone checked either fact before signing.

The SEMMMS business case and business-rates modelling was carried out by a group of companies clustered around the name Corderoy — George Corderoy LLP, Corderoy Ltd, Corderoy Project Services, Corderoy Energy, Corderoy Property Company, Corderoy International, a dormant Abu Dhabi subsidiary called CIL, and Corderoy Infrastructure Ltd. Company data I pulled on these entities showed weak finances throughout: Corderoy Ltd recorded £0 in assets against £1,015,740 in liabilities and just £16 in cash; Corderoy Infrastructure recorded £0 in assets against £2,001,140 in liabilities and £15,190 in cash. Council payment records show £38,534.65 paid to Corderoy Infrastructure in March 2012, and a further £3,685.40 and £3,415 paid to George Corderoy & Co in August and October 2012.

When I asked why this group — including a dormant entity registered in Abu Dhabi — had been chosen over UK-based alternatives, the Council’s first answer was that establishing why would take too much time. When I put a direct follow-up question, “Why was Corderoy chosen to do work regarding the funding of the bypass?”, the Council Solicitor ruled it potentially defamatory and refused to put it to the meeting. The Council’s substitute answer was that Corderoy had provided “independent Quantity Surveying advice” on quantities and rates only. A question about how public money was allocated was blocked as legally risky to ask; the payment records themselves were not.

Mouchel Consulting Ltd received monthly payments from Stockport Council through 2011 and 2012 — £37,344.11 in June 2011, £64,806.77 in April 2012, £34,980.74 in July 2012 among them — including invoices in September 2012 specifically for “Environmental Impact Assessment Services re SEMMMS.” Those payments continued straight through a period when Mouchel’s own finances were in serious difficulty: a lender-controlled restructuring, a missed rescue-deal deadline, shareholders nearly wiped out, cost-cutting alongside a chairman’s pay rise, and a share-price collapse despite a £180 million debt refinancing. None of that is, on its own, evidence of anything improper on the SEMMMS contract specifically. It is simply not very reassuring.

NPS Stockport — a name that recurs across this whole series of books — was paid £47,454.50 for land and property advice, acquisition and compensation work, and landowner and resident liaison along the route, confirmed in a February 2013 Freedom of Information response and again in a July 2013 letter from Councillor Iain Roberts, who described the company as “a going concern.” Readers of the Harcourt Street book will already know what to make of that reassurance.

And then there is the smaller, almost farcical detail that says more than it should: SEMMMS documents at one stage referred to the road as the “A6102” — which is not this road at all, but a road in Sheffield. The error was flagged. It was never corrected. It is a fair question to ask how much confidence anyone should have in consultants being paid substantial public money who could not, at least on paper, keep straight which road they were working on.

Chapter Four: Democracy for Show

The original SEMMMS Final Report consultation, run before 2004, asked the public what they actually wanted. The answers were clear, and clearly not what was ultimately delivered. Support for “stick” measures such as congestion charging (6%) or workplace parking charges (3%) was minimal. The public’s own ranked list of “potential solutions” put better maintenance of existing roads and pavements top, at 46%; extending Metrolink came second, at 35%, clearly ahead of building new roads, which polled 26%. Better bus services and cheaper fares each polled 28%. The road that was eventually built — the only one of these options actually delivered, alongside some disconnected cycle lanes — sat below several public transport alternatives the public itself had preferred.

The SEMMMS Final Report’s own logic held that a new road was meant to be a last resort for genuinely local traffic, only after public transport measures had been tried. The tram still has not come to Stockport.

The consultations run afterwards did not improve matters. The SEMMMS newsletter cost £46,413.41 to print and distribute 282,500 copies; by my own reckoning, only around 9,000 responses came back. A later “Feedback From Stage 1” exercise saw 250,000 leaflets distributed and 9,465 responses analysed, with headline questions I believe were framed to produce the answer wanted — one effectively amounting to “do you want the bypass a lot, very much, or can’t live without it.” A further consultation on the £290 million scheme saw roughly 7,893 responses from around 85,000 leafleted homes — one in ten — which the Council characterised as a large, favourable response. The first-stage consultation ran over Christmas and New Year, when people were busy with other things; the pattern repeats with the entirely separate Vale View School consultation in the Harcourt Street book, run over the school holidays when parents were away.

Council literature at the time promised the three authorities would “analyse the feedback… to help develop a preferred scheme.” I asked what would actually happen, and what documents would exist, if that feedback came back against the bypass. I did not get a satisfactory answer.

One resident’s verdict on the quality of a consultation event, reported at the time, sums up the standard on offer: of five staff present, three were, by their own admission, “there to make up the numbers.” The resident called it “absolutely staggering” for a scheme “affecting thousands of lives.” Rod Liddle, writing in The Sun that same December, mocked the consultation questionnaire for spending more time asking about respondents’ race, religion and gender identity than about the road itself.

Chapter Five: Friends in High Places

This scheme has never lacked for political sponsors, and its history is, among other things, a history of who turned up to back it, and when.

In late November or early December 2011, I understand a meeting took place between Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander, local MP Mark Hunter and Chief Executive Eamonn Boylan, at which approval for the scheme’s direction was effectively given without a business case, funding plan or traffic modelling in place. It has been suggested, separately, that nearby housing developments “couldn’t be built without the road” — which, if true, raises the question of which was really driving which.

Danny Alexander returned repeatedly. On 5 February 2014, the Stockport Express reported on a visit under the headline “Let’s do it all again with Relief Road II,” hosted by LibDem parliamentary candidate Lisa Smart and MP Sir Andrew Stunell, backing Phase Two of the scheme — the Hazel Grove-to-Bredbury link to the M60. A related article from three weeks earlier, on 22 January 2014, is worth quoting from directly. Smart, then the party’s prospective candidate for the seat, had personally invited Alexander to Hazel Grove: “I’m delighted Danny has accepted my invitation to visit Hazel Grove — I very much look forward to showing him just why Phase Two of the Relief Road is a ‘must’ for Hazel Grove.” She continued: “Danny is the man who signs the cheques for these projects, so it’s a great opportunity for us to make our case strongly to secure the cash needed to complete the road.” The same article confirms that Phase Two was “earmarked to carve through ancient woodland at Norbury Brook, south of the A6 in Hazel Grove,” and would take land at Brookside Garden Centre and Hazel Grove Golf Club. Conservative councillor William Wragg, also standing for the seat, backed the road “in principle” while criticising “the Liberal Democrats’ recent decisions” and stressing he had tried to ensure the most affected residents’ views were heard. Residents of Darley Road and Ashbourne Road had protested the previous year against a route running just metres from the ends of their gardens.

A further visit, on 1 October 2014, saw Transport Minister Baroness Susan Kramer make the same journey, again hosted by Smart, again backing Phase Two — this time the section from the A6 to M60 Junction 25 via Bredbury. Smart was, by her own account and the paper’s, an enthusiastic and consistent advocate for extending this scheme, from her time as parliamentary candidate through her years as a Stockport councillor for Bredbury Green and Romiley, and was present at the A555’s opening ceremony in October 2018 — shortly before the flooding this book documents in Part Two began.

Not every encounter with the Council’s leadership was as cordial. Council Leader Dave Goddard publicly called me a liar at a full Council meeting, and never apologised or produced evidence for the claim. A question of mine for the 29 November 2010 Executive Meeting — concerning a Boylan/Howard Bernstein/Department for Transport meeting for which no minutes were taken, and asking whether the Council intended to keep funding a scheme “in a cul de sac” — was blocked as “offensive” before it could be asked.

Stuart Jackson, Service Director for Place Management, refused on separate occasions to explain whether business rates could fund both reduced central grants and the bypass simultaneously, and refused to justify a claimed figure of 5,450 new jobs the scheme was said to deliver, which he himself dismissed, in private, as “pie in the sky.” A related Freedom of Information request concerning a separate claim by Councillor Goddard of 11,000 jobs and halved traffic saw the underlying jobs figure withheld entirely, on grounds of commercial sensitivity.

And then there is the exchange recorded in this book’s foreword: then-Council Leader Sue Derbyshire, asked in a public question why the cost had risen from £400 million to £600 million — one of several such intermediate jumps on the road to £1 billion — sneering that she didn’t know “where Mrs Oliver gets these ridiculous figures from,” when the figures came from the Council’s own agenda papers for that very meeting.

Chapter Six: Vexatious

There is a pattern to which questions got asked, and which got blocked, and it runs straight through the middle of this scheme’s entire history.

On 7 January 2013, questions relating to Vale View School — the subject of this series’ first book — were ruled vexatious at a Council Executive Meeting, while bypass-related questions were permitted to proceed in the same period. The same pattern recurs on 2 April 2013 and again, more formally, on 4 February 2013 — the same meeting at which my question about Corderoy’s selection was ruled potentially defamatory rather than merely vexatious. A letter dated 13 June 2013 confirms the second-stage bypass consultation’s own budget: £320,000. A separate letter from April 2013 gives the first-stage consultation cost as £420,000; total consultation spend across the scheme, in historic, non-inflation-adjusted pounds, ran to around £750,000.

Set the numbers side by side. Questions about the bypass’s own funding and consultants were, at various points, ruled too dangerous to ask. Questions about an entirely separate school were ruled too vexatious to ask, in the same weeks, by the same Council. Both rulings served the same practical purpose: fewer questions, less scrutiny, and a scheme that kept moving regardless.

The pattern held right up to the road’s opening. Before construction finished, I asked a straightforward question about the Flood Risk Assessment underpinning the scheme’s drainage design — the same FRA that Chapter Eight shows should never have survived proper scrutiny. I was told, in terms, that I was wasting the valuable time of council officers and councillors. It is my belief, based on what I have been able to establish, that no standalone Flood Risk Assessment ever existed separately from the one folded into the Environmental Impact Assessment — a belief I have tried repeatedly to confirm directly with the Council, without ever receiving a reply. I intend to locate and publish the correspondence recording that “wasting valuable time” response in full. Until then, readers should treat it as what it is: my own recollection of an exchange I am confident took place, not yet a document I can put in front of you. The pattern elsewhere in this book suggests it fits rather too neatly to be a coincidence.

Chapter Seven: What the Land Gave Up

A ten-kilometre dual carriageway does not build itself on empty ground. By February 2014, the Council was in talks with 178 separate parties over compulsory purchase orders covering agricultural, recreational, residential, industrial and commercial land. A public inquiry opened at Edgeley Park that October, before planning inspector David Wildsmith, with more than fifty objectors heard over two weeks. Chief Executive Eamonn Boylan described CPOs as “a last resort,” used only after negotiation with landowners had failed.

The scheme also cost the borough its wildlife, on a scale the Council itself struggled to justify. Around 1,200 great crested newts had to be relocated to receptor sites in Bramhall and Hazel Grove, under a Natural England licence, with 33 kilometres of fencing and 6,000 pitfall traps installed across ten separate areas. The Daily Mail reported the Council spending £210,000 to build ponds for just eighteen newts — £11,666 each. One unnamed expert, described to me as a “famous newt expert,” told me the mitigation procedure gets followed correctly and the newts “usually die anyway.”

A 2014 Council report went further still, proposing to narrow the A6 through Hazel Grove itself from four lanes to one each way, once the relief road opened, pushing displaced traffic onto residential streets. Local councillors Kevin Hogg and Ben Alexander both objected in strong terms — Hogg accusing the report of not understanding “the mentality or the intelligence of highways officers,” Alexander objecting to its “premises, recommendations and presumptions” outright. A string of resident letters that summer called it a “barmy scheme.” MP Sir Andrew Stunell said afterwards it had been “dreamt up behind the scenes by officers,” and that local Liberal Democrats had “forced the council to drop the plans.” It was scrapped on 16 July 2014.

I raised my own alternative in March 2010: a Goyt Valley cycle track between Marple and Stockport, in place of what I described at the time as the “80 year old A6 bypass/A555 project” — projecting a modal-shift carbon saving worth around 700 people’s contribution to the 2020 target, against a saving worth roughly ten people’s contribution from the £300,000 Otterspool hydro scheme the Council chose to pursue instead. It went nowhere.

BOX-OUT: Build First, Ask Later — the Tesco Precedent

It isn’t only roads. Stockport Council has form for waving through the unapproved, then arguing about it afterwards — and one paper trail shows the pattern playing out on a much smaller stage, a few years before the bypass’s own troubles began.

In August 2005, a full meeting of Stockport Council passed a formal motion on the Tesco store at Portwood. It noted, in black and white, that the store “has been built 18,000 sq ft bigger than the approved plan.” It noted that the Council’s own Planning Department had been told the increment was “the direct result of a management decision within Tesco” — not a site surprise, not an engineering necessity, a management decision. And it noted, citing a Times report of a few days earlier, that “complex planning procedures associated with Tesco are not uncommon.” The Council meeting, the minutes record, “deplores” what had happened.

Deploring it did not undo it. What followed was not enforcement but paperwork. In March 2006, a retrospective planning application to legalise the 11,095 square metre store — foodstore, petrol station, car park, landscaping, and the associated highway works — was withdrawn. By September 2006, a second retrospective application covering exactly the same development was back in front of the Tame Valley Area Committee. The store, by then, had been standing and trading, 18,000 square feet over its permission, for the best part of a year.

I also raised a separate, more pointed concern directly with Tesco at the time: access to fire exits and emergency escape routes at the store. Tesco’s Property Communications Manager wrote back to assure me the company was “very mindful of our fire and safety obligations” and that access would be “maintained as required.” It is one thing to promise that after the fact. It is another to have built the thing that way in the first place, and to only be answering a member of the public’s letter about it because she asked.

Nobody was prosecuted. Nobody was made to take anything down. The unauthorised 20% — the full 18,000 square feet of it — is, so far as I can establish, still standing today, still sectioned off from the rest of the store. For a time Tesco used it to store goods, which is a very Tesco way of quietly making use of floorspace nobody had actually given them permission to build. I complained that doing so was blocking the fire exits behind it. The section, I understand, has had to be kept empty ever since — or should be.

Two decades on, that sectioned-off, empty 18,000 square feet is the most honest monument this story has produced: a space nobody is allowed to use, standing exactly where an unauthorised management decision put it, because taking it down was never going to happen and using it properly was never going to be allowed either. Bear this in mind as later chapters describe a road scheme built, and re-built, ahead of the paperwork that was supposed to authorise it. Stockport Council does not tend to unbuild its mistakes. It fences them off and moves on.

Part Two: The Road That Floods

Chapter Eight: They Were Warned

Every time the A555 floods, the Council and the Highways Agency reach for the same word: unprecedented. Design shortcomings. Prolonged and unusually heavy rainfall. Nobody could have known.

Except somebody could have known. Somebody did know. It happened before, on the same stretch of Greater Manchester ring road network, to the same client, and — on the evidence available — with at least one of the same firms in the room.

A dress rehearsal at Denton and Middleton

Long before the A555 was a hole in the ground, the M60’s Denton to Middleton section gave Greater Manchester a full dress rehearsal of everything that would later go wrong at the airport relief road: torn-up cost estimates, a design that couldn’t cope with the ground it was built on, and — once it opened — a motorway that flooded.

The contract was let at £110 million over a planned three years. It came in roughly 50% over budget, with a claim bill in the region of £40 million. Along the way there was a last-minute redesign of 28 kilometres of cable ducting, and a skewed, tunnel-like rail underbridge whose piled foundations had to be redesigned after Railtrack refused to allow the piling rigs onto the line — a refusal that, one has to ask, might have been worth establishing before the contract was let rather than after.

The route also cut straight through the Audenshaw reservoir complex, requiring one section to be drained so the road could cross it, and the dam behind it to be rebuilt using clay dug from a cutting elsewhere on the site. The plan called for 340,000 cubic metres of “weaker clay” for the dam’s shoulders. About a fifth of it came out of the ground before, in the words of Highways Agency project engineer John Dutson, the clay quality in the cutting “deteriorated dramatically,” leaving a shortfall of 270,000 cubic metres. Mr Dutson’s explanation is worth quoting in full, because it could serve as the standing epitaph for this entire road-building programme: “The extent and interpretation of the original site investigation boreholes missed what proved to be an extensive volume of unsuitable material.”

In plain English: they didn’t look hard enough at what was actually in the ground before they started building on it. A year of the eighteen-month delay was down to sorting this out. The final bill for the main construction alone came to at least £300 million — £80 million over the tendered price.

Then it flooded

Denton to Middleton opened late. It then flooded — repeatedly, and badly enough that a Highways Agency board director, Richard Bennett, wrote to the local MP, Andrew Bennett, and admitted it in terms the Agency does not usually commit to paper. Writing on behalf of chief executive Archie Robertson, he confirmed that drainage and surfacing problems were causing “spray… worse than anticipated” and conceded there were also problems with the road structure itself.

The worst-affected stretch — a six-kilometre, S-shaped section between Junctions 22 and 24, built by Amec and Alfred McAlpine for £141 million and opened eighteen months late in October 2000 — was closed for seven hours on one occasion while fire crews pumped floodwater up to 700 millimetres deep along 300 metres of live carriageway.

I asked the obvious follow-up question: how much compensation was eventually paid out because of this. The answer was £114 million. I then asked what budget had been set aside to cover it. The answer was: nothing.

The Highways Agency, in other words, was able to find £114 million down the back of the sofa when its own design let it down. Council taxpayers in Stockport, Manchester and East Cheshire do not have a sofa of that size, and yet it is exactly the position the A555 now leaves them in.

The Bredbury problem, and the human cost

The M60’s Junction 25 was designed on the assumption that it would connect to the A6(M) — a road that never received planning permission and still, decades later, does not exist. The result is a junction that disgorges motorway traffic straight into the daily Bredbury bottleneck it was never actually built to handle, with drivers required to join the carriageway in the fast lane. For years this junction saw a number of deaths, mainly of young people, before speed cameras were finally installed. One local resident’s verdict on the flooding-warning signs put up after the road opened has stayed with me: “This was meant to satisfy the inept consciences of the developers/planners and engineers… It is an accident waiting to happen and mark my words one day someone will be killed. But until that day… sleep well, Mr Mouchel.”

That name is not incidental to this book. Mouchel is recorded as the designer of the Denton-Middleton section. Mouchel is also on Stockport Council’s own payment records for SEMMMS — specifically, invoiced in September 2012 for “Environmental Impact Assessment Services,” with monthly payments running from June 2011 to November 2012, continuing straight through the period when Mouchel’s finances were themselves in serious trouble. To be fair to the record, EIA work is not the same discipline as drainage and structural design, and this book has not established exactly what role, if any, Mouchel played in the A555’s own drainage design. But the coincidence of the same firm’s name appearing on both the road that flooded before and the road that has flooded since is one this book is not going to pass over quietly.

What the investigators actually found

This is not speculation dressed up as journalism. Mott MacDonald was commissioned by Stockport Council to investigate the A555’s flooding, and its Section 19 report — read from the document itself, not summarised by a press office — is far more damning of the road’s drainage than anything the Council or the Highways Agency has said publicly.

The new sections of the road were built under a design-and-build contract by a joint venture between Carillion and Morgan Sindall. When Carillion collapsed, Morgan Sindall alone finished the job. The road had already flooded during construction and was flagged in the borough’s own 2016 flood investigation reports — before it had even opened to traffic.

The flood risk assessment approved by the Council set the design intent plainly: the new road’s drainage should mimic existing, pre-construction “greenfield” run-off, and should not increase flood risk downstream. To achieve this, drainage was split into networks with their own discharge limits: Network A (a pond at the west end of the new A6 section), Network B (Mill Hill Hollows, discharging to Norbury Brook, becoming Lady Brook downstream), Network C (also at Mill Hill Hollows, to Lady Brook), and Network E — which, unlike A, B and C, sends every drop it collects, attenuated or not, into the original, pre-existing A555 drainage system, eventually reaching Spath Brook and the River Dean, outside the borough altogether.

Network E is where the design unravels. During development, the contractor’s design absorbed what had originally been planned as a separate Network D — one meant to drain locally at the Woodford gyratory. The result, in the investigators’ own words, is that “in excess of 1300m of carriageway plus substantial ‘green areas’” now drain into the original A555 network to the west — a system, on the original design, only ever sized to cope with 700 metres of carriageway. More than twice the load the pipe was built for, going into the same pipe.

That load reaches the original system through a flow-control device called a “Hydrobrake,” capped at roughly 200 litres per second, fed by two cascading attenuation ponds, E1 and E2, upstream. Pond E1 was designed to hold 4,527 cubic metres; pond E2, 981 cubic metres. A post-construction survey found the actual outlet pipes on these ponds had been installed 700 millimetres (E1) and 180 millimetres (E2) higher than their own design specified — reducing, from the moment they were built, the volume of floodwater either pond could actually hold before overflowing.

The investigators’ own verdict on Network E does not hedge: even on its own reduced ambition — a 1-in-30-year standard, lower than the 1-in-100-year standard applied to Networks A, B and C — it likely does not achieve that in practice, because the ponds take too long to drain down between storms and the design never accounted for extended-duration rainfall or a second storm arriving on the heels of the first. There is also, the report notes, no calculation on file confirming that the original Hall Moss Lane pump station and its below-ground storage could cope with the extra flow the new road’s Network E was now sending its way. Nobody checked whether the old pipe could take the new road’s water before they connected it up.

Elsewhere, the report is scarcely less pointed. Some of the scheme’s “green” drainage areas were sent straight to local watercourses with no attenuation at all, which the investigators say is “difficult to justify… as meeting the intent of the FRA” — the Flood Risk Assessment the scheme was supposed to have satisfied in the first place. Their overall conclusion does not soften the blow: “the shortcomings of the A555 drainage could have been avoided.” They criticise a planning process aimed, it seems, at obtaining consent rather than at delivering what they call “a holistic and robust drainage design” — about as close as an engineering report is likely to come to saying the paperwork was designed to pass, not the drainage to work.

On the ground, this played out exactly as the design flaws predicted. On 28 July 2019, following heavy rain over several days, the A555 flooded at Woodford Road and again at Hall Moss Lane. Police were called at 11:45am; the road was closed by 1:30pm, both ways between the A523 and A34. It reopened at the Woodford Road end the next day, only for the Network C attenuation pond — discharging into Lady Brook — to be found overflowing and damaged. The road reopened again on 30 July, closed again hours later as more rain pushed water back over the carriageway at Hall Moss Lane, closed again on 31 July, and did not fully reopen, in both directions, until 5 August — with one lane kept shut for a further nine days, until 14 August, to fit new pumps and desilt the attenuation tank. At the start of that fortnight, only a single temporary pump had been keeping Hall Moss Lane’s Network E running at all, pending permanent replacements; it could not cope, and ponds E1 and E2 overflowed onto the carriageway itself, some of that overflow reaching the original pump station and contributing, in the investigators’ words, to the flooding there too.

What the report does not say — in fairness

It would be easy, and wrong, to take all of this and claim the A555 caused the flooding of homes on Sandringham Road, Bramhall Green and The Demmings in July 2019. The report itself does not support that claim, and this book will not make it. Only a small share — the investigators put it at roughly 4-5% — of the wider Lady Brook/Micker Brook catchment actually drains from the A555. Their finding is direct: “this investigation does not indicate A555 drainage deficiencies were a significant contribution to the downstream flooding in the borough,” and that the road’s drainage “would have had little effect on the downstream flooding.”

That distinction matters, and readers deserve it stated plainly: the A555’s drainage was badly designed, badly built, and inadequately checked — and that is a serious, documented failure in its own right, responsible for the road flooding itself, again and again. It is a separate question, on the evidence available, from why the homes on Sandringham Road flooded, and the honest answer to that second question points elsewhere.

There is, however, one further finding worth sitting with. The same investigation records that the flooding at Sandringham Road occurred outside the Environment Agency’s own mapped flood extent for that area. Whatever caused it, the flood risk to those properties had been materially underestimated by the very maps everyone — planners, insurers, homeowners — relies on to know whether they’re at risk at all. That is not a fault this book can lay at the A555’s door. But it is a fault, and it deserves its own scrutiny, in its own right, and gets one in the following chapter.

The evidence in the ground

None of this is only a matter of engineers’ reports. Following recent flooding incidents, photographs taken at one of the bypass’s bridge/underpass abutments show sand — the granular backfill material packed behind the concrete facing panels — leaching out through the joints between panels. There are vertical rivulets and staining running down the panel faces where fines have washed through during heavy rain; there is a broad fan of sand deposited at the base of the structure and spreading out across the width of the footway; and there is at least one visibly cracked panel.

This is not cosmetic. Reinforced-earth and crib-type abutments rely on a contained mass of granular fill behind their facing panels, held in with a geotextile filter membrane that is supposed to let water drain through while keeping the fill itself in place. Visible sand loss on this scale, after flooding, points to that drainage/filter system either failing or having been inadequately specified in the first place — the same species of failure Mott MacDonald documented in the road’s drainage networks, this time visible with the naked eye. Left unaddressed, this is how a retaining structure loses the support behind its own face.

Not a local aberration — a national pattern

None of this should be treated as one unlucky road in one unlucky borough. The National Audit Office’s own 2007 report into how England’s roads are costed and built, Estimating and Monitoring the Costs of Building Roads in England, sets out a pattern that fits Stockport’s experience almost exactly. Completed Highways Agency schemes ran 6–40% over their initial estimates depending on how you adjust for the accounting method used; current schemes at the time of the report were forecast to run 27% over; local-authority-led schemes were running at 18% over when completed and a forecast 31% over while still under way.

The NAO’s own breakdown of why is instructive. Construction costs — the actual building work — accounted for roughly half of all overruns nationally. Land and compensation costs accounted for over a quarter. And two of the specific, named national failure categories are the underestimation of structures such as bridges (the report cites the M6 Carlisle–Guardsmill extension, where a bridge costed as a single span turned out, on detailed design, to need three) and the underestimation of ground conditions revealed only once site investigation actually got under way — the same failure, in different words, that John Dutson admitted to at Denton and Middleton.

The Treasury was sufficiently alarmed by this pattern that, from 2003, it required every scheme’s initial estimate to be inflated by a contingency of between 3% and 45% — rising to 65% for the most complex schemes — purely to compensate for what it politely calls “optimism bias”: the well-documented tendency of those proposing a scheme to overstate its benefits and understate its costs and risks. This is not a partisan or a local accusation. It is the settled, published finding of the Government’s own independent auditor, applied as standard practice across the entire English roads programme, because promoters of these schemes could not be trusted to estimate them honestly on their own.

Stockport Council’s response to being asked why the A555’s costs kept changing was that there was no single document tracking the changes. The National Audit Office’s response to the same question, asked of the whole country, was to build a formal, published, government-mandated mechanism for correcting the underestimation in advance — because it happens so reliably that it can be forecast as a percentage.

The pattern completes itself

Put it together, and the pattern is not subtle. A contractor’s estimate is torn up by ground conditions nobody checked properly. The road opens late, over budget, and floods. The public body responsible admits the fault only when a letter from an MP forces its hand, and finds the money to fix it from a budget line that officially does not exist. Somewhere in the paperwork, a familiar consultancy’s name recurs. And a resident who watched it happen once already warned, in writing, that it would happen again.

It has.

Chapter Nine: The Map That Missed Them

Ask anyone whose home flooded on Sandringham Road in July 2019 whether they knew they were at risk, and the honest answer, for most of them, will be no. Not because they weren’t paying attention. Because the map that was supposed to tell them said they weren’t.

Mott MacDonald’s own investigation into the flooding recorded it plainly: the flooding at Sandringham Road happened outside the Environment Agency’s mapped flood extent for that area. The very tool that exists to tell homeowners, insurers, planners and councils where the water is likely to go, in the one event that actually tested it, was wrong.

This is not a criticism of the A555 itself. The same investigation was equally clear that the bypass’s own well-documented drainage failures were not a significant contributor to what happened at Sandringham Road — only 4-5% of the wider Lady Brook/Micker Brook catchment drains from the road at all. Whatever flooded those homes, it was not, on the evidence, the bypass. This chapter is not about the road. It is about the map.

What a flood map is actually for

The Environment Agency’s flood maps are not a curiosity. They are the document a mortgage lender’s surveyor checks. They are what an insurer prices a premium against, or declines to. They are what a planning committee is supposed to consult before allowing a new development to go ahead nearby, and what a homeowner is supposed to be able to rely on when deciding whether to buy sandbags or buy a house. When that map is wrong, everyone downstream of the decision it informs is making that decision on false information — not carelessly, but because they did exactly what they were told to do and checked.

For the people of Sandringham Road, checking the map would have told them they were safe. In July 2019, the water did not agree.

An underestimation, not just an absence

It would be one thing if this area of Bramhall Green and The Demmings simply hadn’t been mapped at all — a gap, a limitation of resources, an honest “we haven’t got to this yet.” That is not quite what happened. The Environment Agency’s maps are modelled flood extents, built from data about catchments, rainfall, ground levels and drainage capacity. A property being outside the mapped extent isn’t an absence of information; it’s a positive assessment that the water shouldn’t reach that far. In this case, that assessment was wrong, and residents built their understanding of their own risk on it.

This matters for a reason well beyond one wet week in 2019. Flood maps are revised periodically, but only when someone goes back and checks the modelling against what actually happened. If nobody asks the question — did the map get this right? — an underestimated area can sit quietly underestimated indefinitely, invisible right up until the next event proves it wrong again, for the next family, in the next street the model didn’t see coming.

Questions this book puts on the record

Has the Environment Agency revised its flood-risk mapping for Sandringham Road, Bramhall Green and The Demmings since the July 2019 event, in light of Mott MacDonald’s finding?
If not, on what basis — and have residents in that area been told, in writing, that the map they may still be relying on has already been shown to be wrong once?
What obligation, if any, did Stockport Council have to notify residents or update local flood-risk guidance once its own commissioned investigation established this finding?
Were any planning decisions — for the A555 itself, or for any other development in the catchment — made on the strength of the same flood modelling that failed to predict what actually happened at Sandringham Road?
Is Lady Brook/Micker Brook catchment modelling, more broadly, now considered reliable by the Environment Agency, or is this event treated as an isolated anomaly rather than a signal to re-check the wider model?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the kind that should have been asked, and answered, by the Environment Agency and the Council in the weeks after Mott MacDonald reported — not left for a book, years later, to be the first place they are written down.

Chapter Ten: Since Then

The flooding did not stop, and neither, to be fair, did the attempts to fix it. This final chapter of Part Two brings the story up to date — and asks whether the response has matched the scale of what went wrong.

The road flooded again on New Year’s Eve going into 2025, and stayed closed for over a week. The Federation of Small Businesses wrote to the three councils, citing serious disruption to local trade and openly questioning the competence behind the road’s design and construction. The flooding was not an isolated local event: Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s own report on the 31 December 2024/1 January 2025 incident places it within a wider, borough-spanning flood event — heavy rainfall, overwhelmed drainage, river flood risk all combining at once, rather than the A555 failing in isolation. That context matters, but it does not excuse a road that had already been shown, by its own commissioned investigators, to have “shortcomings… that could have been avoided.”

By 2021, a Stockport councillor, David Meller, told a full Council meeting the authority simply did not know whether an engineering fix was even possible, still less what it would cost. Four years on from that admission, the scale of the response has grown, but so has the list of closures. In July 2025, Cheshire East Council completed an upgrade to the A555’s pumping station, doubling its capacity and replacing a control panel that had clocked up more than 61,000 hours of continuous use — itself a telling detail about how hard the existing infrastructure had been leaning on ageing equipment. In March 2025, Stockport’s own budget committed a further £2.5 million to drainage and maintenance work on the road.

These are not nothing. A doubled pumping capacity and a modern control system should, in ordinary rainfall, reduce the frequency of closures. But “should reduce” is not “has fixed,” and neither council has claimed otherwise: both have been explicit, in public statements, that no upgrade can eliminate flood risk entirely, only reduce it. What is harder to find, at the time of writing, is a published Section 19 flood investigation report specific to the most recent flooding events — the kind of document that gave this book its Mott MacDonald material for the 2019 floods in the first place. Either no formal investigation was triggered by the 2024-25 event, or its findings have not yet been made public. Given everything documented in the previous two chapters, that is not a detail this book is willing to let pass without comment.

After a further closure following Storm Claudia — reported as the road’s fourth closure in two years — Cheadle MP Tom Morrison wrote to Stockport Council calling for a multi-agency summit: remaining drainage failures, overdue remediation, coordination between the agencies involved, funding, and a proper site visit, all named explicitly in his letter. That such a summit needed to be called for, rather than having happened automatically after the fourth closure of a £350 million road within two years, is itself the clearest evidence this book can offer that the accountability structure around this scheme remains as loose today as it was when the first questions in this book were being asked, and blocked, more than a decade ago.

The road opened promising to connect communities. What it has mostly done, on the evidence gathered across these pages, is connect one avoidable failure to the next — cost estimates that moved by hundreds of millions of pounds without ever settling, consultants whose selection could not survive a straight question, consultation exercises that measured enthusiasm rather than sought a genuine answer, and a drainage system that its own investigators say could have been built properly the first time. Nobody has ever proven any of this to be corrupt. Nobody, on the evidence gathered here, has ever adequately explained why it needed to go wrong quite this many times, in quite this many ways, before anyone in authority was prepared to say so plainly.

I was called vexatious for asking. I am still asking.

Author’s Note

Every figure, letter, meeting minute, planning reference and quoted line in this book is drawn from a dated document, a council or company record, a published report, or a contemporaneous news article — set out as such where it appears. Where I have relied on my own recollection of something said rather than a written record, I have said so plainly, rather than dressing memory up as a document. Where the evidence available did not support a claim I might have wished to make, I have said that too, rather than making it anyway.

This is the third book in the Vexatious? Moi? series. It will not be the last, because the road, at the time of writing, is still flooding, the drainage still has not been properly fixed, and the people responsible for both still have not been made to answer the questions this book puts to them in plain English. If you have information that bears on any of the above — particularly on the A555’s drainage design, on the Council’s own decision-making, or on anything else in these pages — the Romiley Gazette newsroom would like to hear from you.

Sheila Oliver Editor, Romiley Gazette

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/a555-airport-relief-road-flooding-21258332

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The Romiley Gazette

Vexatious? Moi? Book 3 – The Bent Bypass.

Foreword: They Had the Papers Too