Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman
PO Box 4771
Coventry
CV4 0EH
Reference 25 017 921
Dear Rayne Wilson,
RE: COMPLAINT REFERENCE 25 017 921 REQUEST FOR
RECONSIDERATION
Thank you for your letter of 21 September 2026 and the enclosed final decision
statement. I am writing to ask that this decision be reconsidered, on two
specific points where I believe the assessment does not reflect the actual
position.
- This is a continuing matter, not a stale historic one
The decision treats my complaint as “late” on the basis that the underlying
issues have been ongoing for over two years, and states there is “no evidence
these matters have caused an ongoing significant personal injustice.”
I would ask you to reconsider this. The matters I raised are not a single historic
event that occurred more than 12 months before I complained to you – they are
a continuing state of affairs that remains unresolved today. The land at Padden
Brook remains, as of the date of this letter, in the same unresolved
enforcement position it was in when I first raised it. The injustice is not
something that happened once and ended; it is ongoing, current, and continuing
to affect the land and the residents around it every day the enforcement case
remains open without explanation. I would respectfully submit that the 12-
month lateness rule under sections 26B and 34D of the Local Government Act
1974 is designed to catch complaints about discrete past events, not to bar
scrutiny of a situation the complainant says is still actively unresolved at the
time of the complaint.
2
- The Council’s own reference to “criminal matters” was not investigated
Paragraph 8 of the assessment records that the Council “informed Mrs X that
some of the matters she has raised are criminal matters and should be referred
to the police.” This point does not appear to have been explored further in the
assessment. I would ask the Ombudsman to consider whether it was appropriate
for the Council to identify potentially criminal conduct on protected land and, on
the evidence available to me, take no further steps of its own and whether that
response was itself part of the maladministration I have complained about,
rather than a satisfactory answer to it.
What I am asking
I ask that the decision be reconsidered in light of the above, specifically: - Whether the “late complaint” finding is appropriate given that the underlying
matter is continuing and unresolved, not historic; and - Whether the Council’s own acknowledgement that some matters raised were
potentially criminal was adequately considered in reaching the “unlikely to find
fault” conclusion on the communications restriction.
I recognise the Ombudsman is not obliged to change its decision, and I am not
asking you to revisit matters that were properly and fully considered. I am
asking specifically because I believe the “late” characterisation does not fit a
situation I have told you, and continue to tell you, is ongoing.
I would be grateful for your response at your convenience, quoting the
reference above.
Yours sincerely,
Sheila Oliver
My book on the subject –
3
VEXATIOUS? MOI?
Book 7
The Wall of Silence: How Stockport Council Blocks the Questions It
Doesn’t Want to Answer
Sheila Oliver
Editor, Romiley Gazette
For Our Vicki
4
Other Books in This Series
Book One: Harcourt Street / Vale View Primary School — a primary school built on a former toxic
waste tip in North Reddish; contamination, undersized capacity, traffic danger, and the missing Sport
England playing fields.
Book Two: Padden Brook — a protected woodland in Romiley cleared tree by tree through a
sequence of small planning applications, and the communications restriction that followed sustained
questioning of it.
Book Three: The A555 / SEMMMS (“The Bent Bypass”) — the Manchester Airport Relief Road’s rising
cost, its consultants, its consultation, and the flooding that has closed it almost every year since it
opened.
Book Four: Sandringham Road — a flood-prone former garage site in Cheadle Hulme, disputed land-
use claims, and the six playing-field parking spaces that were never actually approved.
Book Five: Offerton Precinct — two decades of disrepair under Tenbest Limited’s ownership, a
misleading Freedom of Information response, and the covenant that made the site unbuildable for
housing all along.
Book Six: The Marple Money — the £20 million Levelling Up Fund-backed Marple Active
Communities Hub, and a councillor’s rapid rise to a Cabinet role overseeing it.
Book Eight: The Foggbrook Files — the former Trident Foams site, the neighbouring
Foggbrook/Blackstone Road landfill, and the ongoing silence over the Compstall Mill contamination
investigation.
Also in this series: “Learning Law From a Lawless Council (Stockport)”, the story of Michael Parnell,
the Stockport Town Hall protestor.
5
A Note on This Book
This book is built from primary documents — Council letters, Freedom of Information and
Environmental Information Regulations responses, Ombudsman correspondence, planning
application records, committee minutes, and screenshots of the Council’s own systems taken in real
time — gathered across nearly two decades of campaigning and reporting on Stockport
Metropolitan Borough Council.
Unlike the earlier books in this series, which each follow a single case from beginning to end, this
book asks a different question: taken together, what do Harcourt Street, Padden Brook, Offerton
Precinct, Sandringham Road, the A555, the Michael Parnell case and the Marple Active Communities
Hub actually have in common? The answer, this book argues, is not simply that the Council has made
mistakes in each of them — all councils make mistakes — but that a recognisable, repeating
machinery exists for absorbing scrutiny before it can do its work: officers and members labelling
persistent questioners “vexatious” or “unreasonable,” correspondence quietly diverted to inboxes
read only occasionally, and information systems that are, again and again, simply not there when a
resident, a journalist or a councillor tries to use them.
Where this book draws a connection between cases, or characterises a pattern, that is the author’s
own analysis, clearly signalled as such. Where it states a fact — a date, a figure, the wording of a
letter — that fact is drawn from a document in the author’s possession. Full case detail for each
individual investigation remains in its own dedicated book in this series; this volume is the
connective tissue between them.
6
Contents
Introduction: A Pattern, Not a Coincidence
Chapter One: The Monitoring Officer — Vicki Bates and the Architecture of “Vexatious”
Chapter Two: The Vexatious Files — Seven Cases, One Machine
Chapter Three: The Website Is Down When You Need It Most
Chapter Four: What the Pattern Adds Up To
Appendix A: The Padden Brook Restriction Letter (24 August 2026)
Appendix B: The Original Complaint (21 August 2026)
Appendix C: The Mapping System, Caught Failing Twice
Appendix D: The Ombudsman’s Decision (21 September 2026)
7
Introduction: A Pattern, Not a Coincidence
Every council makes decisions residents disagree with. Every campaigner who pushes hard enough,
for long enough, eventually hears that they are being difficult. What follows in this book is not a
complaint that Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council has occasionally got things wrong. It is a
record, assembled case by case and document by document over many years, that the Council has
developed a consistent method for insulating its decisions from the kind of sustained scrutiny that
might otherwise expose them — and that this method has been applied, in strikingly similar
language and through strikingly similar routes, to entirely unrelated matters: a primary school built
over a former toxic tip, a protected woodland being cleared tree by tree, a shopping precinct left to
rot for two decades, a garage site prone to flooding, a half-billion-pound bypass that floods on
schedule every winter, the treatment of a named individual who has since died, and the rapid
elevation of a councillor to a cabinet role overseeing a £20 million grant.
The common thread running through all of these is not any single wrongdoing, proven or alleged, at
any single site. It is process: the way the Council responds when someone persists in asking what
happened, who decided it, and why. Three elements of that process recur so often across such
different subject matter that they can no longer be treated as separate stories. They are the subject
of this book’s three central chapters: the use of “vexatious” and “unreasonable actions”
designations to stop questions being answered at all; the specific role of the Council’s Monitoring
Officer, Vicki Bates, in applying and defending that designation across more than one unrelated case;
and a persistent, well-documented unreliability in the Council’s own public information systems —
planning portals, decision notices, mapping tools — that fails, over and over, at the precise moments
residents most need to check what the Council has actually done.
None of this is offered as proof of any single act of corruption. Much of it is offered as a pattern the
reader can weigh for themselves, set out with dates, reference numbers and the Council’s own
words wherever they survive. Where the author draws a conclusion that goes beyond what a
document shows, this book says so.
8
Chapter One: The Monitoring Officer — Vicki Bates and the
Architecture of “Vexatious”
A Council’s Monitoring Officer occupies an unusual position. The role exists, in law, to safeguard
lawfulness and good administration — to be, in effect, the conscience of the organisation. At
Stockport, that role has been held by Vicki Bates, whose title is given in Council correspondence as
Chief Governance Officer and Monitoring Officer, Corporate and Support Services (and, in earlier
correspondence, Assistant Director – Legal & Democratic Governance / Monitoring Officer, Legal
Department).
It is Bates’s name that appears on the two decisions this chapter examines most closely: the
designation of a resident’s Padden Brook correspondence as “unreasonably persistent,” and the
earlier, related history of Harcourt Street correspondence being ruled “vexatious” by the same office
over a period stretching back more than a decade.
The Padden Brook Restriction
On 24 August 2026, Bates wrote to confirm two things. First, that all of the author’s Freedom of
Information and Environmental Information Regulations requests concerning Padden Brook would in
future be deemed vexatious and would not be acknowledged. Second, that all other
communications concerning Padden Brook and the surrounding area would be treated as
unreasonably persistent under the Council’s own Unacceptable Actions by Complainants Policy —
with future emails diverted to a dedicated inbox, read only weekly, by Bates herself or a deputy.
The letter cited hundreds of emails sent over roughly two years, the impact on council resources,
and what it called “abusive and defamatory content” that had also been “publicly shared” —
without, at any point, specifying which communications were abusive or defamatory, or on what
basis. Bates stated she had considered the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010 and
found no adverse impact. She also reserved the Council’s right to take legal action over the author’s
conduct.
What the letter did not do is engage with the substance of what had been asked. The underlying
correspondence it drew a line under included a formal Stage 1 complaint, submitted three days
earlier on 21 August 2026, asking straightforward administrative questions: what investigation had
the Council undertaken into two years of unresolved planning enforcement concerns at Padden
Brook; what decisions had been recorded; why had the case remained open for so long. Those
questions have not, at the time of writing, been substantively answered. Both letters are reproduced
in full at Appendix A and Appendix B, so the reader can judge for themselves whether the questions
asked were unreasonable, and whether the response actually answered them.
The Council’s Own Policy, Turned Against Itself
The irony documented in this book is that the Council’s own April 2026 policy on unreasonable
complainant actions explicitly states that restrictions of this kind should be a last resort, tailored and
proportionate to the specific behaviour, and never applied as a blanket measure. The author’s
9
formal complaint to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, submitted the same day as
Bates’s restriction letter, argues in detail — citing the policy’s own sections 2.2, 3.6, 9.1, 9.4, 10.1,
10.2 and 14 — that a blanket diversion of all future correspondence on an entire subject, read only
once a week by the very officer who imposed the restriction, cannot meet that test.
The Ombudsman complaint sets out a wider set of grievances: prolonged delay and inadequate
investigation of the underlying enforcement concerns; the Council’s failure ever to specify the legal
basis on which it disputed the land’s protected status, given that Padden Brook’s woodland carries
not one but three separate protections — Local Wildlife Site status, W1 woodland designation, and
protected amenity land dating to a 1963 permission — protections the Council originally denied
existed at all, before eventually admitting each of them in turn, one by one, only as the author’s own
research uncovered them.
A Pattern That Predates Padden Brook
The Padden Brook restriction did not emerge from nothing. A near-identical mechanism — email
correspondence diverted, contact with individual officers barred, and the label “vexatious” applied
— was used against the author’s Harcourt Street correspondence years earlier, beginning with a
formal “vexatious” finding on an Environmental Information Regulations request of 2 April 2025
concerning land instability at Padden Brook, upheld on internal review on 1 July 2025 by Information
Governance Manager Liz Sykes, citing roughly 230 emails sent since August 2024 and the case law in
Dransfield and Craven — the same legal framework used to justify silence, years apart, on two
entirely different subjects.
Going back further still, the Harcourt Street correspondence itself carries a documented history of
council figures — the Council Leader personally, the Council Solicitor, committee chairs — ruling
successive questions “vexatious” before they ever reached a public meeting: in November 2012, in
June 2012, in December 2012, in June 2013, each time blocking a question from being put to the
Executive at all, rather than being answered and found wanting. A blog piece the author later wrote
about Bates’s “renewed scrutiny” over Padden Brook explicitly links her handling of that case to her
earlier handling of concerns the author raised about missing community sports facilities and financial
inconsistencies at Harcourt Street — concerns Bates and her deputy, Michelle Dodds, are said to
have labelled “vexatious” as far back as 2019.
The author’s position, set out at length in the Harcourt Street book in this series, is that the concerns
dismissed as vexatious at that time — about school undersizing, about contamination, about traffic
danger to small children — were subsequently each proven correct by independent events: a
capacity shortfall admitted by the Council’s own 2012 committee papers; asbestos and heavy metals
found on further testing after initial soil tests found none; and, most gravely, a fatal road accident
involving the author’s own child, which she asks this book to record as directly connected to the
traffic dangers she had raised and been told were vexatious to keep asking about.
The Ombudsman’s Answer
On 21 September 2026, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman wrote to confirm its
final decision on the Padden Brook complaint (ref 25 017 921): it would not investigate. Two reasons
were given. First, that the complaint was “late” — the underlying issues had been ongoing for more
10
than two years, and the Ombudsman generally will not exercise discretion to investigate matters
raised more than 12 months after they arose, finding “no evidence these matters have caused an
ongoing significant personal injustice.” Second, on the communications restriction specifically, the
Ombudsman found the Council had “provided Mrs X with reasons for its decision and has carried out
an annual review of the decision in line with its policy,” and concluded an investigation would be
“unlikely to result in finding fault with the Council’s actions.”
One further detail in the Ombudsman’s assessment is worth recording here rather than passing
over. At paragraph 8, the decision notes that the Council “has informed Mrs X that some of the
matters she has raised are criminal matters and should be referred to the police.” The assessment
does not appear to explore this further, or ask what, if anything, was actually done with a criminal
referral on land the Council itself has now admitted carries three separate protective designations.
The author’s own view, offered here as analysis rather than as an established finding, is that a
decision built on “lateness” sits uneasily with a complaint about a matter the complainant has
always described, and continues to describe, as unresolved and ongoing rather than historic.
Whether that view is right is now the subject of a formal request for reconsideration, and a fresh
complaint addressing only the current, present-day status of the enforcement case — deliberately
framed so that it cannot, this time, be characterised as late. The full text of the Ombudsman’s
decision is reproduced at Appendix D.
The Question This Chapter Leaves Open
Whether Vicki Bates’s decisions in any individual case were correct on their own terms is, in each
instance, a matter this book leaves to the Ombudsman, the Information Commissioner, and
ultimately the reader. What this chapter documents is narrower and, the author would argue, more
troubling: that the same officer, applying the same label, using the same legal justification, has now
done this twice — once in a case where the underlying concerns were later shown to be
substantially correct, and once in a case that remains open. A pattern repeated is no longer, on its
own, a coincidence; it is a method. This book’s task is to describe that method plainly enough that
others outside Stockport can recognise it if they see it applied to them.
11
Chapter Two: The Vexatious Files — Seven Cases, One Machine
Each of the cases summarised below has its own dedicated book in this series, where the full
documentary record is set out. What follows is a short digest of each, written specifically to show
how the same mechanisms — delay, the “vexatious” label, blocked questions, and information that
arrives too late to matter — recur across subject matter that has nothing else in common.
Harcourt Street / Vale View Primary School (Book One)
A primary school built on a site with a documented history as a former toxic waste tip, where the
Department of the Environment itself refused three purchase-notice applications in 1974 on the
grounds the land was “tipped land and unsuitable for building” — a finding the Council’s own
Assistant Director of Town Planning reversed three years later. Initial soil testing found no
contamination; further testing, only carried out to satisfy an unrelated public inquiry, found lead,
arsenic and brown asbestos, by which point government grant money had already been committed
and spent. The school was built to a capacity later admitted, in the Council’s own 2012 committee
papers, to fall 21.6% short of local need — a shortfall officers had privately discussed as early as
March 2006, while publicly defending the smaller figure. Warnings about inadequate drop-off
arrangements from the Council’s own highways officer arrived three days before the decision that
approved the scheme. The author’s questions about all of this were repeatedly ruled vexatious and
blocked from council meetings between 2012 and 2013 alone on at least four separate occasions.
Padden Brook (Book Two)
A protected woodland in Romiley, cleared tree by tree over more than two years through a
sequence of individually modest tree-works and outline planning applications, several submitted for
three dwellings or fewer — comfortably under the threshold that would trigger mandatory
affordable housing provision or committee-level scrutiny. The land’s protected status was denied by
the Council, then admitted piecemeal, only under sustained pressure, until three separate protective
designations were eventually acknowledged. Correspondence on the subject is now formally
restricted, as set out in Chapter One.
Offerton Precinct (Book Five)
A shopping precinct owned since the 1990s by Tenbest Limited, part of a complex web of interlinked
companies, allowed to fall into serious, documented disrepair while the Council pursued
redevelopment negotiations for years without resolution. A Freedom of Information response in
2012 told the author the Council had no plans to purchase the site — a response the author later
discovered was issued at almost exactly the time a General Vesting Declaration, the compulsory
purchase mechanism, had already been signed, on 14 January 2012. A covenant on part of the site,
discovered only through the CPO documents, prohibited housing outright — undermining a separate
scheme the Council had allowed local traders to spend years and thousands of pounds pursuing
before refusing it.
Sandringham Road (Book Four)
12
A 2012 application to build housing on a former garage site prone to serious flooding, handled by
planning officer Dominic Harvey. Six promised car parking spaces for an adjoining playing field,
shown on the architects’ own drawings from March 2012 onward, turned out never to have formed
part of what the area committee actually approved in August that year — confirmed only via a
subsequent Freedom of Information response. An ambulance reportedly struggled to reach a
seriously ill resident using the site’s access track days after the council’s own area committee had
refused a site visit.
The A555 / SEMMMS Bypass (Book Three)
A road scheme whose publicly stated cost rose from an original figure of roughly £170 million to as
much as £1 billion at one stage, before settling at a current £350 million, with the Council unable to
produce a single document tracking why the cost changed, despite what the author argues is a legal
duty to be able to do so. The road has flooded in some form in nearly every year since it opened in
October 2018, including a closure lasting more than a week into 2025; an independent investigation
attributed at least part of the problem to drainage components installed hundreds of millimetres
higher than their own design specified. Questions about the scheme’s costs and consultants were, in
parallel with Harcourt Street questions being asked in the same period, separately ruled vexatious or
“potentially defamatory” and blocked from council meetings in January, February, April and June of
2013.
The Michael Parnell Case
A long-running case, documented in a separate book in this series, concerning the Council’s
treatment of a named individual — known locally as the Stockport Town Hall protestor — including
pursuit for £24 of alleged council tax arrears while he was in intensive care, despite his being an
officially designated vulnerable council taxpayer whose circumstances had not changed. Mr Parnell
died before his story could be told in his own words; he entrusted his documents to the author
before his death.
The Marple Active Communities Hub (Book Six, in progress)
The most recent case taken up in this series concerns a £20 million Levelling Up Fund-backed
community hub in Marple and the rapid rise of the councillor now responsible for it to a Cabinet
role, with questions raised about how the funding criteria were met and how the appointment came
about. Vicki Bates appears again in this account, named by the author as a recurring figure in the
same context as the Council Leader she alleges verbally confronted her in Romiley Precinct in 2025.
13
Chapter Three: The Website Is Down When You Need It Most
If “vexatious” is the Council’s answer when a question is asked too often, unreliable public
information systems are its answer when a question is asked in the ordinary way, through the
ordinary channels the Council itself provides. This chapter sets out a pattern of the Council’s own
digital infrastructure failing, repeatedly, at the exact moments residents and journalists have tried to
use it to check what the Council has actually decided.
“Document Unavailable”
The clearest single example concerns planning application DC/044143 (also recorded as DC044143),
relating to Offerton Precinct — a renewal of an earlier outline permission for demolition and
regeneration of the site, granted with a decision issued on 24 January 2011. The only document
listed against this application on the Council’s own planning portal is its Decision Notice. That
document, when accessed, returns “Document Unavailable.” The portal’s public summary for the
same application lists the case officer as “Not Available” — meaning there is, on the Council’s own
public record, no way to establish who made this decision or to retrieve the notice that supposedly
confirms it.
A Live Example, Caught in the Act
While researching this book, the author encountered the same pattern in real time. On 22
September 2026, Stockport Council’s own “Find planning applications” page displayed a standing red
banner reading: “Issues with the mapping system. We’re experiencing some issues with the mapping
system in public access. We’re working with our software provider to resolve this as quickly as we
can.” This followed an earlier occasion, also documented in this research, when the Council’s
planning-applications search page returned a bare “Server Problem” error page rather than any
results at all.
These are not isolated technical hiccups. Taken together with the DC/044143 case above, and with a
separate finding during this research that even the Council’s official application-detail pages —
reached via their own internally generated reference links — could not be loaded at all on the day
they were tried, a picture emerges of a public information system that fails often enough, and at
moments significant enough, to function as a further obstacle to scrutiny, whatever its cause. The
same “mapping system” error was still displayed, unchanged, when checked again on 24 September
2026 — a screenshot from that date, timestamped in the taskbar, is reproduced at Appendix C
alongside the earlier capture, so the reader can see this is not a passing fault but a fault the Council
has lived with for weeks.
The Officer Whose Category Doesn’t Match His Application
A further, smaller irregularity surfaced during this research and is recorded here because it
illustrates how easily an ordinary administrative record can go unexamined when the systems built
to hold it to account are themselves unreliable. Two applications submitted on the same date, for
the same site, by the same case officer and the same agent — both describing, in near-identical
14
wording, retrospective permission for external playground equipment at a public house on Didsbury
Road — are recorded under two different application types. One, DC/099344, is filed as a
straightforward Full Application. The other, DC/099421, is filed as Demolition in a Conservation Area:
a different, separately regulated category with its own statutory tests, which nothing in the
application’s own description mentions. Whether this is a simple data-entry error or reflects works
not captured in the public description is, at the time of writing, an open question the author has put
to the Council directly.
Why This Matters Beyond Convenience
A council’s public planning register is not a courtesy. It is the mechanism by which the law expects
residents, objectors and journalists to hold planning decisions to account — to check who decided
what, when, and on what evidence. When that register is unreliable — when decision notices return
“Document Unavailable,” when case officers are recorded as “Not Available,” when the search tool
itself is down on the day someone tries to use it — the practical effect, whatever the intent, is the
same as if the question itself had been ruled vexatious: the person asking is left with nothing.
15
Chapter Four: What the Pattern Adds Up To
No single chapter of this book proves wrongdoing in any one case. That is not its purpose. Its
purpose is to show what becomes visible only when the cases are placed side by side: that a resident
asking sustained, detailed questions about a primary school built on a toxic tip; a woodland being
felled tree by tree; a shopping precinct left to rot; a flooding garage site; a half-billion-pound road
that floods on schedule; the treatment of a named, now-deceased individual; and a rapidly awarded
£20 million grant — has, in every single case, eventually run into the same three obstacles. A label. A
diverted inbox. A system that does not work on the day it is needed.
The author’s own conclusion, offered here as analysis rather than as an established finding, is that
this is not the accumulation of seven unrelated administrative failures, but a single, recognisable
institutional response to sustained scrutiny — one that has so far proved more durable than any of
the underlying decisions it has been used to shield. The individual cases in this series will each be
judged on their own facts, by the Ombudsman, by the Information Commissioner, and in time by the
reader. What this book asks is a narrower, and in some ways a harder, question: not whether any
one decision was right or wrong, but whether an organisation that responds to persistent,
reasonable questions in the same way, across entirely unconnected subjects, over a period of more
than a decade, can fairly go on describing that pattern as coincidence.
This book will continue to grow as the Padden Brook Ombudsman complaint, the Marple Hub
investigation, and the outstanding Freedom of Information requests referenced in Chapter Three are
answered — or, as has so often been the pattern recorded here, are not.
16
Appendix A: The Padden Brook Restriction Letter (24 August
2026)
Reproduced in full. Sent by Vicki Bates, Chief Governance Officer and Monitoring Officer, Corporate
and Support Services, Stockport Council.
Dear Mrs Oliver
As you know all your FOIs and EIRs relating to any matters concerning Padden Brook have previously
been deemed vexatious and will not be responded to or acknowledged. The reasons for this have
been set out to you previously.
I write to confirm that all other communications that you send via email, letter, by way of a question
to a committee meeting or via any other means of correspondence or communication (including
complaints) to the council relating to Padden Brook or surrounding area will now be treated as
unreasonably persistent pursuant to the council’s Unacceptable Actions by Complainants Policy. This
is due to the number of emails (hundreds) you have sent to the council containing the same or
similar questions over the last 2 years relating to Padden Brook. For example, I note that once again
you refer to the land as being “protected” despite the correct position being set out to you on a
number of occasions.
Your communications on this subject are unreasonable as they significantly impact the council’s
work, taking up excessive time to the detriment of other services of the council. In addition, you
have sent a significant amount of emails to the council which contain abusive and defamatory
content, which you have also publicly shared. These often relate to the council’s planning officers
and department, to which your complaint relates. I will share these with the ombudsman in the
event you escalate your complaint to them. I also reserve the council’s rights in relation to any legal
action it may wish to take against you in relation to your conduct referred above.
Please find attached a copy of the policy and a link to the policy on the website :- Make a formal
complaint – Stockport Council
All your emails will be diverted to a specific inbox and will only be read once per week by either
myself or one of the council’s deputy monitoring officers. I will review this restriction on your
communications to the council in six months time. I have considered the impact of this restriction on
your communications pursuant to the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010 and do not
consider there to be any.
Yours sincerely
Vicki Bates (She/Her)
Chief Governance Officer and Monitoring Officer, Corporate and Support Services, Stockport Council
17
Appendix B: The Original Complaint (21 August 2026)
Reproduced in full. Sent by the author to Katie Moores, Lisa McGrane, Michael Cullen, the Leader,
and Planning.DC, three days before Appendix A was sent in reply.
Dear Sir/Madam,
Formal complaint – Padden Brook planning enforcement and unreasonable delay
I am writing to make a formal complaint about the handling of the planning enforcement matter
concerning Padden Brook.
This matter has now been ongoing for more than two years, yet I remain concerned that there has
been no effective resolution or meaningful enforcement action. In particular, I am concerned about
the apparent lack of progress by the enforcement officer despite the circumstances at the site
continuing to develop.
The issues I understand to have been brought to the Council’s attention include: the dumping of a
derelict butty van on the land; the subsequent transformation of that vehicle into what now appears
to be a site office; the dumping/placement of a table and chairs on the land; the fact that the land is
protected land; and the continuing use and occupation of the site despite the passage of more than
two years since the enforcement concerns were raised.
I appreciate that the Council has discretion as to whether formal planning enforcement action is
appropriate. My complaint, however, is not simply that I disagree with a particular planning decision.
It is principally about the length of time this matter has remained unresolved, the apparent lack of
effective investigation and the failure to provide a clear explanation of what action the Council has
taken and why.
I would therefore ask the Council to treat this as a formal complaint and provide a clear response
addressing the following: what investigations have been undertaken; what enforcement
investigations or decisions have been recorded, and on what dates; what is the current status of the
enforcement case; whether the change from a derelict butty van to its current use as a site office has
been assessed as a potentially separate or materially changed planning matter; whether the
placement and use of the table and chairs has been investigated; whether the Council has
specifically considered the protected status of the land when assessing the alleged breaches; and, if
enforcement action is not appropriate, the reasons and relevant planning considerations for that
conclusion — or, if no final decision has yet been made, why the matter has remained unresolved for
more than two years.
I am particularly concerned about the apparent length of the delay. The Local Government and
Social Care Ombudsman has previously found fault with Stockport Council in relation to delay in a
planning enforcement investigation. I therefore expect the Council to address the issue of
unreasonable delay specifically rather than simply restating the general position regarding planning
enforcement discretion.
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I would also ask that this complaint is considered independently of the officer whose handling of the
matter is the subject of the complaint, in accordance with the Council’s complaints procedure.
Please confirm that this has been registered as a formal Stage 1 complaint and provide me with the
relevant complaint reference number.
Yours faithfully,
Sheila Oliver, Editor, The Romiley Gazette
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Appendix C: The Mapping System, Caught Failing Twice
Stockport Council’s own “Find planning applications” page, stockport.gov.uk/find-planning-
applications, screenshot taken 24 September 2026 — date visible in the taskbar clock.
The same standing red “Issues with the mapping system” banner referenced in Chapter Three, still displayed more than two
weeks after it first appeared — confirming this is an ongoing failure, not a one-off.
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Appendix D: The Ombudsman’s Decision (21 September 2026)
Reproduced in full. Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, ref 25 017 921. The
Ombudsman’s own practice is to anonymise complainants as “Mrs X” in published decisions; that
anonymisation is preserved here as it appears in the original.
21 September 2026
Complaint reference: 25 017 921
Complaint against: Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council
Dear Mrs Oliver
Complaint about Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council
As you know, the Ombudsman asked me to decide if we can and should investigate your complaint.
You will see from the attached final decision statement that I have decided we will not consider your
complaint further.
I recognise this may disappoint you but thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention. By
law, we must tell the Council of our decision, so I have sent it a copy.
We publish our final decision statements on our website. We use false names and do not reveal
details that could identify people involved.
The Ombudsman’s final decision
Summary: We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s response to complaints Mrs X
has raised about a local site. This is because the complaint is late and there is no good reason to
exercise discretion to investigate. We will also not investigate the Council’s decision to restrict Mrs
X’s communication with it. This is because an investigation would be unlikely to find fault with the
Council’s actions.
The complaint
- Mrs X complained the Council has failed to properly investigate or take enforcement action
regarding concerns she has raised about a local site. She also complained the Council has restricted
her communication with it.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers - The Local Government Act 1974 sets out our powers but also imposes restrictions on what we can
investigate. - We cannot investigate late complaints unless we decide there are good reasons. Late complaints
are when someone takes more than 12 months to complain to us about something a council has
done. (Local Government Act 1974, sections 26B and 34D, as amended)
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- We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’.
We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the
complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully.
We do not start or continue an investigation if we decide there is not enough evidence of fault to
justify investigating, or any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement. (Local
Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), section 34(B))
How I considered this complaint - I considered information provided by Mrs X and the Council.
- I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.
My assessment - Mrs X has been complaining to the Council regarding activities taking place at a local site for
several years. She has also complained that the Council has deemed her a vexatious complainant
and restricted her communication with it. - The Council has responded to Mrs X with details of the site visits it carried out and the laws which
govern the site, confirming it has not found evidence further action is necessary. It has informed Mrs
X that some of the matters she has raised are criminal matters and should be referred to the police. - The Council has confirmed it considers Mrs X’s communication with it on these matters to be
excessive. It has therefore restricted her ability to communicate with it and has assigned her a single
point of contact in line with its vexatious complainant’s policy. It reviewed this recently and upheld
the decision. - Mrs X wants us to find the Council at fault. The Ombudsman will not exercise discretion to
investigate matters that took place more than 12 months before the complainant came to us unless
there are good reasons for the delay. Given the issues complained about have been ongoing for over
2 years it would have been reasonable for Mrs X to complain to us much sooner. There is no
evidence these matters have caused Mrs X an ongoing significant personal injustice. There is
therefore no good reason to exercise discretion to investigate. - With regards to the Council’s decision to restrict Mrs X’s contact; the evidence shows the Council
has provided Mrs X with reasons for its decision and has carried out an annual review of the decision
in line with its policy. An investigation into this part of the complaint would be unlikely to result in
finding fault with the Council’s actions.
Final decision - We will not investigate Mrs X’s complaint because parts of the complaint are late and there is no
good reason to exercise discretion to investigate. An investigation into the remaining parts would be
unlikely to find fault with the Council’s actions.
Investigator’s decision on behalf of the Ombudsman
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