Sheila Oliver
Other Books by this Author
Vexatious? Moi? — Book 1: Harcourt Street and Vale View Primary School
Vexatious? Moi? — Book 2: Padden Brook
Vexatious? Moi? — Book 3: The Bent Bypass (the A555/SEMMMS Manchester Airport Relief Road)
Vexatious? Moi? — Book 4: Sandringham Road
Vexatious? Moi? — Book 5: Offerton Precinct
Vexatious? Moi? — Book 6: Marple Money (the Marple Active Communities Hub)
Vexatious? Moi? — Book 7: The Wall of Silence — How Stockport Council Blocks the Questions It Doesn’t Want to Answer
Learning Law From a Lawless Council (Stockport) — the Michael Parnell case
A Note on This Book
This book is built from primary documents: council letters, Freedom of Information and Environmental Information Regulations responses, planning applications, Companies House records, geological and geoenvironmental reports, and contemporaneous press coverage, gathered over more than two decades. Where a claim goes beyond what a document shows, it is flagged as the author’s own view or interpretation rather than presented as established fact.
Contents
1. The Trident Foams Timeline
2. Foggbrook, Fog Brook and Blackstone Road: One Site, Three Names
3. Compstall Mill: Silence Since July
4. The Silence That Speaks: A Pattern, Not an Accident
Appendix A: The Trident Foams Letters (2004)
Appendix B: The Blackstone Fields Letter (2011)
Appendix C: Site Records — Foggbrook and the Former Trident Foams Site
Chapter One: The Trident Foams Timeline
For years I walked past the former Trident Foams site on Marple Road, Offerton — a former mill building later used for printing works and foam manufacturing — and knew, because it had been reported in the local press, that the land beneath it was contaminated. I also knew, because I could see it with my own eyes on my daily walk, that no contaminated soil had been removed before the first houses went up.
When I raised this with then-Council Leader Mark Hunter at a full council meeting, his response was not reassurance. It was sarcasm: “Are you watching at midnight?”
The paper trail tells its own story. A letter from Stockport MBC dated 7 September 2004 explained the Council’s “safe development suitable for use” policy under the Part IIA contaminated land regime, and confirmed that sampling had taken place in December 2003 and March 2004, with an estimated 140–180 tonnes of material removed for licensed disposal in March 2004.
But less than two months later, on 29 November 2004, a further Council letter — responding to my doubts that any remediation had actually happened — admitted the Council was still only in possession of waste transfer notes for the demolition of site structures: asbestos roofing, brick, wood, general site waste. Nothing for the excavation of contaminated material itself. The Council was, in its own words, “still awaiting receipt of waste transfer notes for the excavation of contaminated materials from site.”
By January 2005, when I wrote again, the Council’s response characterised my concerns as “hearsay evidence obtained by yourself.” It also confirmed that transfer notes for the removal of contaminated material had only been received on 23 December 2004 — after a 15 December conversation had evidently prompted someone to go and find them.
What Freedom of Information later confirmed was this: 22 lorry loads of contaminated soil were eventually removed from the site. But by the time that happened, the houses were already going up.
Read the sequence in order and there is no other honest way to describe it. In September 2004 the Council assured me remediation had been carried out. Two months later, when pressed, it admitted it could not produce the paperwork to prove that. Two months after that, when I persisted, it dismissed my concern as “hearsay” — while, by its own admission, still lacking the very transfer notes that would have settled the question. The Council did not have evidence for what it told me in September. It said it anyway. When the true position finally emerged, it was not corrected voluntarily; it took repeated, specific pressure to drag it out. And once the 22 lorry loads were finally confirmed removed, no apology followed — not for the initial assurance that turned out to be unfounded, not for the two months spent disputing a resident’s “hearsay,” and not for the houses that had already gone up on land the Council could not, at the time, actually vouch for.
This is not a story about a single missed deadline. It is a story about a council that, when directly and repeatedly asked to prove contaminated land had been dealt with before people moved in, could not produce the paperwork — and chose, instead, to dismiss the person asking as a nuisance.
The Council’s own 7 September 2004 letter, reproduced in full at Appendix A, is worth reading directly rather than taking my word for it: it confirms trial pits and boreholes were dug between 2 and 11 December, further sampling on 1 March, and remedial excavation on 1 and 19 March 2004, removing an estimated 140–180 tonnes of material — dates and figures that only emerged once the Council was pressed.
Chapter Two: Foggbrook, Fog Brook and Blackstone Road — One Site, Three Names
It would be easy to mistake Foggbrook, Fog Brook Print Works, and Blackstone Road for three different places. They are not. They are the same site off Marple Road, Offerton, referred to at different times by its local name, its historical use, and its street address — and its story runs in one continuous line from a fenced-off playing field to a housing development, with an unresolved contamination question sitting underneath the whole way through.
The playing field nobody tested
A Council letter of 3 June 2010, responding to a Freedom of Information request, confirms that initial sampling at this land began in 2001, “in response to public observations,” and was expanded via a ground investigation commissioned from Edge Consultants UK Ltd in 2002 (Edge report No. 312.5). Following that report, public access from Marple Road to the site was physically restricted with fencing — a restriction still in place as of 2010, nearly a decade later. The same letter is explicit that the neighbouring former Trident Foams operational site is a distinct piece of land, already remediated and redeveloped by 2005.
A Council site plan dated 28 May 2010 titles the land the “Former Fog Brook Print Works site, identified for further investigation under Part IIA EPA 1990 strategy,” showing it bounded by Poise Brook, adjacent to Foggbrook Close and Tannock Close housing, with an allotment garden to the west and a playground marked within the site itself.
A Greater Manchester Geological Unit report on the same land — this one headed “Blackstone Road, Offerton” — is unambiguous about what a site walkover found: the playing fields domed in profile, marshy in places, rough grasses, a children’s play area sitting on a separate raised feature. The report’s own words: the site has “potentially been landfilled,” no records exist for this, but “domestic refuse was found in trial pits in an earlier investigation,” the site is “raised above the surrounding houses,” and “a recent landfill gas investigation found elevated levels of methane and carbon dioxide.” A study of historical maps and aerial photographs, the report notes, was “unable to establish when the site was filled.”
The recommendation, signed by David Waghorn (Unit Surveyor) and Sally Shaw (Contaminated Land Officer), was plain: a full ground gas and contamination investigation, to establish the nature, age and depth of the fill and properly assess the risk to anyone using the site.
Children played on that raised feature. Families used that playing field. And the underlying land had, by the Council’s own geological unit, been flagged for methane risk on ground that might have been an unrecorded landfill.
Readers of my earlier book on Harcourt Street and Vale View Primary School will recognise the shape of this immediately: land with an unassessed industrial or waste history, a gas risk identified by the Council’s own experts, and years passing with no comprehensive investigation completed. It happened once at Vale View. Here it is again, a mile or so away — on the very same land that would, within two years, become a housing development.
From landfill to housing: Blackstone Road and the company that vanished
By 2012, this land had moved from fenced-off playing field to development site. A planning application was published in the Stockport Express on 29 August 2012, naming THI Riverside Ltd — a company formed barely a year earlier, in April 2011 — as the preferred developer.
It is worth remembering what this land actually was before anyone thought to build on it: for generations, the dumping ground for night soil — the collected excrement of the mill workers’ housing in central Stockport, at a time when those houses had no sanitation. Land used for that purpose does not stop being contaminated because a century has passed.
The site investigation for the proposed development found what the Blackstone Road geological report had already flagged: a significant concentration of methane and carbon dioxide, a preliminary risk to future occupants assessed as high, and — in language taken directly from the investigation — “the potential for significant volumes of toxic and/or inflammable/explosive gas to be present during site construction works… is high.” An earlier attempt to build on this land had been abandoned outright, on the recommendation of investigators who found the fill noxious and unpredictable.
None of this stopped the Council pressing ahead with THI Riverside Ltd as preferred developer. So who was behind that company?
Before I go further, a word on how I read what follows. I spent years working for the German Diplomatic Service’s Visa Service at the Consulate in Manchester, where I was trained by German officials to spot fraudulent documents and dishonest applicants — to look past what a form claims and ask what the underlying pattern actually shows. That training does not switch off just because the subject is a Companies House filing instead of a passport. A web of companies sharing directors, sharing addresses, and ending in dissolution with negative net worth is not, on its own, proof of wrongdoing. But it is exactly the kind of pattern I was trained to notice — and exactly the kind of pattern that a council doing basic due diligence on a “preferred developer” ought to have noticed too.
Companies House officer records for THI Riverside Ltd (company number 07603506) show five names: Carl Alexander Lewis and Garry Lewis, both appointed directors on the day the company was founded, 13 April 2011; Michael Richard Lethaby and Peter Charles Stone, appointed as directors three months later; and Andrew Thomas William Ryan as company secretary.
Carl Alexander Lewis is not a name that exists in isolation. He is a co-founder — alongside Marjorie Doran and John Henley — of Monorival Ltd and Lewhen Developments Ltd, both dissolved companies with substantial negative net assets. He also founded Mendplant Ltd with Elaine Lewis, another dissolved company that ended with net liabilities exceeding its assets. And Carl Lewis and Garry Lewis — his fellow THI Riverside director — jointly run Carl and Garry Lewis LLP, confirming this was no coincidence of surname.
John Henley, meanwhile, founded three near-identical companies on the same day in November 2006 — My Carbon Earth Limited, My Carbon World Limited and My Carbon Planet Limited — all Sheffield-registered, all with him as sole shareholder. My Carbon World Limited has since been dissolved.
This is the profile of the “preferred developer” chosen for a site with confirmed high methane risk, sitting on land with a documented history of waste disposal spanning more than a century: a director with a personal history of companies ending in dissolution and negative net worth.
THI Riverside Ltd did not, in the end, build the development. Bellway Homes did, with sustainable drainage eventually made a condition of the site. But the Council’s own Q1 2013/14 Corporate Performance and Resources report records £4.298 million of council funding tied to the neighbouring Dialstone Facility re-provision, running in parallel with “a revised master plan for the Blackstone Fields redevelopment… being proposed by the developer.” A Manchester Evening News headline from the period put it more bluntly: “Hefty bill for multimillion pound Offerton plan.”
Council taxpayers, not the vanishing developer, were left carrying the risk on a site the Council’s own investigators had twice warned could not be safely built on without serious further work.
A Council letter of 8 July 2011, reproduced at Appendix B, confirms the developer had by then been appointed for “a scheme at the Dialstone Centre and the Blackstone Fields site,” that a six-month ground gas investigation was underway, and that initial monitoring “demonstrate[d] that ground gases being generated within the landfill site at Blackstone Fields are not migrating off site.” Readers should weigh that official reassurance against everything else in this chapter, and reach their own view of how much confidence it deserves.
Set this letter beside the Greater Manchester Geological Unit’s own findings a year or so earlier — elevated methane and carbon dioxide, a site potentially landfilled with no records, a recommendation for full investigation before anyone could say the risk was understood — and the pattern from Trident Foams repeats itself almost exactly. First comes an assurance that things are under control. Only later, and only under pressure, does the fuller picture emerge. The Council was, in the end, forced to commission the ground gas investigation its own geological unit had recommended years earlier. It has never acknowledged that the original response to residents’ concerns was inadequate, and no apology has ever been offered for the years spent behind a security fence with no comprehensive investigation completed.
Chapter Three: Compstall Mill — Silence Since July
I spent years working in a busy cancer department in a local hospital. I have seen, at close range and over and over again, what long-term exposure to carcinogens actually does to a person — not as a line in a risk assessment, but as a diagnosis, a treatment plan, and, too often, a death. So when I read a contaminated land report that flags “elevated concentrations of arsenic, lead and asbestos requiring further consideration” and then watch a council simply decline to say whether anyone qualified has actually checked the work, I do not read that as a dry technical dispute. Arsenic and asbestos are not abstractions to me. They are the reason people I once cared for were dying. A council that cannot be bothered to answer four straightforward questions about them is not being merely bureaucratic. It is gambling with something I have watched cost people everything.
If Trident Foams and Blackstone Road tell us how Stockport Council has historically handled contaminated land, Compstall Mill tells us that nothing has changed.
On 8 July 2026, I wrote formally to the Council’s Head of Planning and Contaminated Land Team, copied to the Leader, Emma Curle, Vicki Bates, my MP’s office, and two local councillors, raising specific technical concerns about the contaminated land investigation submitted for the Compstall Mill redevelopment.
Compstall Mill’s industrial history, as the Phase I assessment itself acknowledges, extends well beyond a conventional cotton mill: extensive printing works, numerous tanks, bridge works, filter beds, pits and reservoirs, dating to the late nineteenth century. The Phase II investigation found elevated concentrations of arsenic, lead and asbestos requiring further consideration — yet the investigation reads as a generic contaminated land assessment, not one specifically designed around a historic textile printing and dyeing site’s known hotspot risks.
I asked four straightforward questions: had the investigation been independently reviewed by the Council’s own contaminated land specialist; did it adequately characterise contamination from the site’s specific industrial history; had further targeted sampling been requested; and how was the Council satisfied that every plausible contamination pathway had been investigated before any decision was made.
As of the time of writing, more than seven weeks later, I have received no response of any kind — not from the Head of Planning and Contaminated Land Team, not from Emma Curle, not from the Leader’s office, and not from Vicki Bates.
This is not a story about one letter going astray. Every FOIA and EIR request I have submitted on matters Vicki Bates has any connection to meets the same fate: not refusal on the merits, not “we disagree with you,” but silence, or a formal declaration that the request itself will not be acknowledged.
Chapter Four: The Silence That Speaks — A Pattern, Not an Accident
Ask Stockport Council a single, specific, professional question about contaminated land — who reviewed it, what was found, what happens next — and you would expect, at minimum, an acknowledgement. What follows is what actually happens.
The pattern, site by site
| Site | What was asked | Who it went to | Response |
| Padden Brook | Formal Stage 1 complaint (21 Aug 2026) on planning enforcement delay, land protection status, and site activity | Katie Moores, Lisa McGrane, Michael Cullen, the Leader, Planning.DC | Answered 24 Aug 2026 — not with substance, but with a notice that all further FOI/EIR requests would be deemed vexatious, and all other correspondence diverted to an inbox read weekly |
| Padden Brook | EIR request (2 Apr 2025) asking whether land instability had been investigated and which officers were involved | Council EIR team | Refused under EIR reg 12(4)(b) and FOIA s.14(1); internal review upheld the refusal (1 Jul 2025) |
| Compstall Mill | Formal letter (8 Jul 2026) asking whether the Phase II contamination investigation had been independently reviewed, and four related questions | Head of Planning and Contaminated Land Team, cc the Leader, Emma Curle, Vicki Bates, Lisa Smart’s office, Cllrs Clark and Bresnahan | No response of any kind from any recipient, as of writing — over seven weeks of silence |
Two different sites. Two different subjects — one a woodland enforcement dispute, the other a technical question about arsenic, lead and asbestos on a former print and dye works. The one constant across both is Vicki Bates, and the one constant in her Council’s behaviour is that a direct, specific, answerable question is never actually answered. It is either formally refused as vexatious, or it is simply left to die in an inbox.
Why this matters more than either case alone
Stockport Council’s own April 2026 policy on unreasonable complainant actions states that restrictions must be “a last resort, tailored and proportionate,” applied case by case — not a blanket approach. A council that genuinely assessed each request on its merits would occasionally say yes. It would sometimes answer the technical question and decline only the repetitive one. What the record above shows instead is a single officer’s name attached to a uniform outcome, regardless of the subject matter, the site, or the specificity of the question. That uniformity is itself the evidence: a policy applied identically regardless of content is not being applied at all.
The longer shadow
Vicki Bates was not the officer of record when Stockport Council first showed this instinct. Long before her name attached itself to Padden Brook, the Council’s handling of contamination at Trident Foams and the neighbouring Foggbrook/Blackstone Road land followed the identical shape: warnings of high methane and CO2 risk, a preferred developer whose named director sat behind a trail of dissolved companies with negative net worth, and residents’ FOI requests met with delay, obstruction, and — in one case — a large report sent by expensive photocopy and courier rather than the email that was actually requested.
The point of raising Trident Foams and Blackstone Road here is not to suggest Bates was personally responsible for decisions made before her time. It is to show that what looks, case by case, like one official’s individual conduct is in fact the house style of Stockport Council’s planning and legal departments across two decades: minimise, deflect, delay, and — when persistence continues — reclassify the person asking as the problem. Vicki Bates did not invent this pattern. She inherited it, and has applied it with unusual consistency.
What the reader should take from this
A council that cannot bring itself to say, in writing, “yes, our specialist reviewed it” or “no, we did not require further sampling, and here is why” on a site with confirmed arsenic, lead and asbestos is not protecting itself from vexatious correspondence. It is avoiding scrutiny of a decision it may not be able to defend. The silence is not an absence of an answer. It is the answer.
Appendix A: The Trident Foams Letters (2004)
Stockport MBC, Environment & Economic Development Services, ref. 403810, 7 September 2004. Signed by Elaine McLean, Director of Environment & Economic Development Services, and Stephen Wignall, Environmental Protection Officer (Contaminated Land).
Page 1 of 4 — setting out the “safe development, suitable for use” policy and the statutory definition of contaminated land.
Page 2 of 4 — the Source-Pathway-Receptor pollutant linkage test and typical contaminating substances.
Page 3 of 4 — the planning procedure and site-specific history of the former Trident Foams land.
Page 4 of 4 — sampling and excavation dates, tonnage removed, and the cover system condition, signed by Stephen Wignall.
Appendix B: The Blackstone Fields Letter (2011)
Stockport MBC, Corporate & Support Services Directorate, 8 July 2011. Signed by S. C. Houston, Corporate Director, Corporate & Support Services.
Confirming the developer appointment for the Dialstone Centre/Blackstone Fields scheme, the ongoing six-month ground gas investigation, and initial gas monitoring results.
Appendix C: Site Records — Foggbrook and the Former Trident Foams Site
Greater Manchester Geological Unit report, “Blackstone Road, Offerton,” signed by David Waghorn (Unit Surveyor) and Sally Shaw BSc(Hons), MSc (Contaminated Land Officer).
The Unit’s site walkover findings and formal recommendation for a full ground gas and contamination investigation, referenced in Chapter Two.
Stockport MBC site plan, dated 28 May 2010, titled “Former Fog Brook Print Works site, identified for further investigation under Part IIA EPA 1990 strategy.”
The 1:1250 scale plan showing the site bounded by Poise Brook, the eventual housing layout, and the land’s proximity to the former Trident Foams boundary.
The author’s own annotated aerial map of the site, marking the slip road realignment and the new housing built in the Foggbrook development.
Annotated aerial view showing the re-aligned Marple Road and the new houses built in lieu of it, referenced in Chapter Two.
