21st September 2026
by Sheila Oliver
This is an opening chapter — a working draft to be built on, in the way the Harcourt Street, Parnell, Padden Brook and A555 books were built: piece by piece, document by document, as more material and Freedom of Information responses come in. It sets out what is publicly known, what has been asked, and what remains to be answered. Where I raise a question rather than an allegation, that is deliberate — the facts as they stand raise the question; they do not yet answer it.
Chapter One: A Very Fast Rise
In May 2024, Michaela Meikle was elected to Stockport Council for the first time, as one of three councillors representing Marple North. Within a comparatively short space of time she held the Cabinet portfolio for Economy, Regeneration & Skills — a role that carries oversight of, among other things, the £20 million Capital Levelling Up Fund grant behind the Marple Active Communities Hub.
Her public profile emphasises local roots, schooling and community involvement. It does not, as far as I have been able to establish, set out a professional or leadership background of the kind that would ordinarily be expected of someone holding a multi-million-pound capital portfolio. That may simply be an omission from a councillor’s public biography — many are thin on this kind of detail — but it is a fair question to ask, and I intend to ask it formally, through the Council’s own procedures, rather than simply assert an answer.
Council leaders will no doubt point out, correctly, that Cabinet members are supported by experienced officers — in this case Paul Richards, Deputy Chief Executive for Development & Regeneration — and that major decisions go through the full Cabinet. That is the process working as designed. Whether it is working as intended, in this instance, is a separate question, and one this book will try to answer with documents rather than assumptions.
Chapter Two: A Prosperous Suburb, a Levelling Up Grant
Marple is not, on any conventional measure, a deprived part of Stockport. It has two railway stations, a low crime rate, strong community groups, sought-after schools, canal walks, and among the highest property values in the borough. The Levelling Up Fund was conceived, at least in its public framing, to direct capital toward places facing economic hardship or chronic underinvestment.
The Council’s successful case for Marple was not built on deprivation statistics. It was built around the loss of a local facility — Marple Baths closed in 2018 — recast in the language the fund’s assessors were known to respond to: reduced access to essential services, health inequalities, regeneration potential. That is not, in itself, improper; bid-writing to a known assessment framework is what every council under this fund did. But it is worth setting down plainly what happened, because the next part of the timeline is the part that needs explaining.
Chapter Three: Rejected, Then Suddenly Not
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities announced the results of Round 2 of the Levelling Up Fund on 19 January 2023, allocating £2.1 billion across 111 successful bids. Marple’s was not among them. Council leaders were, by their own account, furious at what they took to be a snub, having been encouraged, they said, to resubmit a strengthened proposal.
“The reasoning behind the rapid about-face appears to be a mystery to town hall bosses, who have greeted the decision with jubilation but no little bafflement.” — contemporary press coverage of the reversal
Weeks later, in the Spring Budget of 15 March 2023, Stockport was awarded the £20 million after all — one of only three levelling-up capital projects in the North West to share in £58 million set aside in that Budget. Council leader Mark Hunter called it “great news for Marple and for Stockport.” Nobody in the published record has ever satisfactorily explained why a bid that failed the Department’s own competitive process in January succeeded, at full value, via a Budget announcement in March.
That gap — between a competitive process that said no, and a Budget line that said yes — is where this book starts.
Chapter Four: Anwar Majothi and the Department
Readers of the earlier books will recognise the name. Anwar Majothi spent fifteen years, from 2007 to 2022, as Stockport Council’s Corporate and Central Complaints Manager — the officer responsible for handling, among a great deal else, my own complaints and Freedom of Information requests about Vale View School, the A555, and the Council’s conduct more generally. I have called him, more than once, “Stockport Council’s Don’t Bring Your Complaints To Me Officer,” and I stand by the description.
According to the record I hold, Mr Majothi became a Senior Adviser at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities in June 2023 — three months after the Marple award was confirmed in the Budget. On the dates I can currently verify, that puts him outside the Department at the point the decision was actually reversed, which is a fact worth stating clearly rather than glossing over. It does not answer the question of what contact, formal or informal, he may have had with the Department before his official start date, nor does it explain the reversal itself. Both are now the subject of formal Freedom of Information requests, to the Department and to Stockport Council, asking for his exact start date and role history, and for any correspondence naming him in connection with the bid.
I want to be precise about what is and is not being said here. I am not asserting that Mr Majothi personally arranged £20 million for Marple. I am asserting that a long-serving Stockport officer with an established history — set out at length in the earlier books — of managing complaints in ways that consistently favoured the Council, went on to a senior role at the very Department that reversed its own funding decision in the Council’s favour, and that the public record currently contains no explanation of the reversal at all. That is a legitimate question for a local paper to ask. It is the Department’s and the Council’s job to answer it, not mine to assume the answer in advance of the documents.
Chapter Five: The Family Question
There is a further, more delicate strand, which this book will only run if and when it can be documented properly: the suggestion, put to me directly, that Cllr Meikle’s rapid elevation to a major Cabinet portfolio is connected to a family relationship with another Cabinet member. I have not yet seen documentary evidence either way, and I will not print an assumption dressed as a finding. What I have done is ask, formally, for the Council’s own record of how and why the appointment was made — who decided it, and on what basis — through the Freedom of Information request drafted alongside this chapter. Until that comes back, this remains a question, not a claim.
Chapter Six: What Happens Next
This book, like the others, will be built from primary documents as they arrive, not from assumption. The immediate next steps are:
• A meeting with Luke Green at Stockport Council to view the underlying Marple Hub files in person, as requested by letter.
• A Freedom of Information request to MHCLG (successor department to DLUHC) for the internal record of the January-to-March 2023 reversal, and for Anwar Majothi’s employment start date and role history.
As with Harcourt Street, Padden Brook, Parnell and the A555, the pattern I am testing for is not a single smoking document but a repeated one: decisions taken with unusual speed, oversight that turns out on inspection to be thinner than advertised, and a Council machine — Vicki Bates’s office chief among them — that has a long history, set out at length elsewhere in this series, of telling me I have no right to ask. I take that, as ever, with a Nantwich of salt (to quote Nancy Banks-Smith).
Dear Sheila Oliver,
Thank you for your Information Request of 21 September 2026 requesting:
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please provide the following information held by your Department (formerly DLUHC, now MHCLG) relating to the Levelling Up Fund Round 2 award to Stockport Council for the Marple Active Communities Hub (Marple, Greater Manchester):
1. All internal correspondence, submissions, ministerial advice, case notes and decision records concerning the Stockport/Marple bid between 1 January 2023 and 31 March 2023, including any material relating to its initial exclusion from the 19 January 2023 Round 2 announcement and its subsequent inclusion in the funding confirmed around the Spring Budget on 15 March 2023.
2. An explanation, with supporting documentation, of the process and criteria by which the Marple bid moved from not being funded on 19 January 2023 to being awarded £20 million by 15 March 2023, including who took that decision and on what basis.
3. The employment start date, job title(s) and role history of Anwar Majothi within the Department (DLUHC/MHCLG), including whether he held any role, formal or informal, advisory or otherwise, in relation to the Department’s work before his confirmed start date, and whether he had any involvement – direct or indirect – in the assessment, scoring, or decision-making concerning the Marple/Stockport Levelling Up Fund bid at any stage.
4. Any register of interests, conflict-of-interest declarations, or due diligence records held for Anwar Majothi in connection with his prior 15-year employment at Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council.
We will aim to send you a response by 19th October 2026.
If you have any questions, please ask by return email. Please leave the subject line unchanged when replying, to make sure your email gets straight to us.
Yours sincerely,
MHCLG FOIA Team
