18th September 2026

The same planning officer as Padden Brook – Dominic Harvey.

It Was Insanity to Build There

Sheila Oliver

Dedication

To all honest citizens who are appalled at what their highly paid council panjandrums and councillors get up to. Why don’t they listen to local residents?

Also by this Author

Vexatious? Moi? (Book One): Harcourt Street

Vexatious? Moi? (Book Two): Padden Brook

Vexatious? Moi? (Book Three): The Bent Bypass

Learning Law From a Lawless Council (Stockport)

Chapter One: A Car Park, Not a Lake

On 25 August 2012 — days before Stockport Homes’ planning application for the Sandringham Road garage site went in — a resident took to the flooded car park in a canoe. The photographs are unambiguous: a green kayak drifting past a set of football goalposts, a red car parked at the water’s edge as if nothing were amiss, and the water stamped with the date so nobody could later claim it was exaggeration or artistic licence.

It is worth saying plainly, because the Council never did: this was a car park, not a lake.

The site was a former garage block at the eastern end of Sandringham Road, Cheadle Hulme (SK8 5NH), adjacent to the playing fields — a description taken straight from Stockport Homes’ own planning application. Nine days after that photograph was taken, on 2 September 2012, planning officer Dominic Harvey — a name residents of Padden Brook, more than a decade later, would come to know rather too well — received an application to demolish thirteen garages and build six new houses on the site.

Nobody, it appears, thought the flooding worth mentioning.

Chapter Two: What the Committee Actually Approved

Stockport Homes’ agents, Pozzoni LLP, produced a site layout drawing dated 21 March 2012 — a full five months before the application reached committee. It is clearly labelled: “6 new parking spaces added,” sited on what had been part of the adjacent playing field.

On 28 August 2012, Cheadle Area Committee considered the application and resolved to grant planning permission, subject to a commuted sum covering both informal children’s open space and formal sports provision.

And then, on 18 September 2012, in response to a Freedom of Information request, the Council’s FOI Officer wrote to confirm something rather extraordinary: the layout plan actually considered by committee on 28 August 2012 did not include the six car parking spaces shown on the plan submitted with the FOI request — nor any other proposals for the adjacent playing fields.

So the proposal existed. It was drawn up in March. It was circulated. And yet, when it came to what the committee actually approved, it wasn’t there at all.

If putting car parking spaces onto playing fields required prior discussion with Sport England — as this author asked the Council, in writing, on 23 September 2012 — has that discussion ever taken place? Years later, at Harcourt Street, the same question about Sport England’s playing-field protections would still be unanswered.

The six parking spaces, in any case, were later dropped from the scheme altogether. First there were six. Then there were none.

Chapter Three: The Ambulance

On 11 September 2012 — days after the Area Committee refused a request for a site visit, and before a single new house had been built — an ambulance struggled to reach a seriously ill patient near the site. It had to use the very ground where the new houses were about to go.

The Council’s response, relayed via Councillor Paul Porgess, leaned on an Ambulance Service account dated 28 October 2012: a crew member recalled the incident, but said there had been ample space to turn around, and that the walkway entrance was simply obscured by parked cars.

The photographs say otherwise. A sequence taken at dusk that evening shows the ambulance, lights blazing, squeezed past two cars parked on the road and forced, at points, onto the site itself to complete the manoeuvre. There is nothing in these images that resembles “ample space.”

An earlier photograph, dated 27 March 2012, shows the same ground already doing informal duty as an overspill car park — cars parked haphazardly across the open land by the garages, one even displaying a “SOLD” sign, months before any application had been decided. Whatever access problems existed on 11 September had been building for a long time.

Mark Hunter MP took the matter more seriously. In a letter dated 19 October 2012, he confirmed he had personally contacted the Chief Executive of the Ambulance Service to request a substantive response. The same letter confirmed something else worth recording: despite the demolition fencing around the site, all the public footpaths remained legally open — the fencing, a safety measure for the garage demolition, had simply blocked the access track in practice.

It should not have taken an MP’s intervention to establish that residents’ own eyes were not deceiving them.

Chapter Four: Fifty Per Cent Contamination

WML Consulting’s Generic Quantitative Risk Assessment for the site (report no. 5062/G/02, February 2012) opened with reassurance: the desk study had concluded the potential for a significant pollution linkage was “low,” and no visual or olfactory evidence of ground contamination had been recorded during the site investigation.

Then, at paragraph 8.8, the same report recorded that of four soil samples chemically analysed, two — half of them — exceeded the relevant Generic Assessment Criteria for human health. Arsenic at 260mg/kg. Vanadium at 85mg/kg. PAH compounds, including Benzo(a)pyrene, at 24mg/kg.

As this author noted in the margin of her own copy: “therefore, 50% of the investigation points show contamination!”

The site’s own in-house asbestos survey, carried out on 23 August and 6 September 2012, tested garages 4 to 7 and found asbestos cement — containing white asbestos, chrysotile — in all four samples taken. Garages 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10 could not even be inspected intrusively, because nobody could locate the keys held by the former managing agent, NPS.

And the site sits some 848 metres from a registered former waste transfer site at Adswood Lane — itself built, like the site at Harcourt Street, on the former Jackson’s Brickyard. Readers of the Harcourt Street chapters will recognise the pattern immediately: contamination downplayed in the summary, contamination confirmed in the detail, and houses built regardless.

Chapter Five: Sport England, Again

Complaints about footballers causing obstructions at the Sandringham Road playing fields led Councillor Porgess, in an email of 29 October 2012, to announce that the Council would now send warning letters to clubs using the fields — threatening their lettings.

Read alongside the Harcourt Street book, the irony writes itself: having failed to deliver the playing-field provision promised to Sport England at Vale View School, Stockport Council’s response was not to examine its own record, but to threaten the very clubs trying to use the pitches that remained.

Porgess wrote this letter to the Stockport Express about the Vale View primary school – clearly an idiot.

Chapter Six: Before the Bypass

It should be said clearly, because it matters for the wider argument of this book: the flooding at Sandringham Road predates the A555 by years. The bypass did not open until October 2018. The photograph of the canoe is dated 2012. The flooded pitch, the flooded pavement and drain, the standing water lapping at a football goal — all of it was already a known, photographed, dated feature of this land long before a single spade went into the ground for the relief road.

That the Council would go on, years later, to build a £350 million road across land with its own long and difficult flooding history should come as no surprise to anyone who had already watched houses go up on a Sandringham Road car park that had, within living memory, hosted a kayak. An earlier photograph, dated 5 July 2012, already shows standing water pooling by the garages — this was not a one-off summer storm, but a site that flooded repeatedly, for months, before a single objection had even been considered.

Chapter Seven: The Blocked Footpath

Long before the demolition fencing went up, this had been a working footpath — part of the informal network of tracks residents used to cross between the site, the garages and the surrounding fields. Photographs of the site showed a gate and a stretch of temporary metal mesh fencing closing off a gap that plainly used to be a way through: wooden gateposts still standing either side, a worn path visible beneath the leaf litter on the far side, leading out toward open grassland.

As established in Chapter Three, Mark Hunter MP confirmed in writing that the footpaths remained legally open throughout — the fencing was only ever meant to be a demolition safety measure. In practice, for anyone standing in front of it, the distinction meant nothing at all.

Chapter Eight: Even the Bin Lorry Got Stuck

If Stockport Council’s own contracted refuse vehicles couldn’t get access the site was meant to guarantee, what hope did an ambulance have on 11 September, or any resident on any other day of the week?