Sheila Oliver
Editor, Romiley Gazette
Dedicated to Peter Devine — a proper journalist.
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
Vexatious? Moi? — Book 8: The Foggbrook Files
Vexatious? Moi? — Book 9: Arms Length: The Story of Stockport’s Own Companies
Learning Law From a Lawless Council (Stockport) — the Michael Parnell case
Contents
Introduction: The Advice Money Buys
Chapter One: Harcourt Street — Pressure and a Rubber-Stamped Road
Chapter Two: The Bypass Consultants — Corderoy, Mouchel and the Wrong Road
Chapter Three: A National Pattern — GVA Grimley, Tesco, and the Making of Planning Policy
Chapter Four: Who Regulates the Regulators?
Introduction: The Advice Money Buys
Every planning decision this series has examined has, somewhere in its paper trail, the same figure: the paid consultant. Not the elected councillor, not even always the council officer, but a private firm, commissioned at public expense, whose report is then relied upon as the “independent” evidence that makes a controversial decision defensible. The consultant’s advice is what officers cite to committees. It is what committees cite to objectors. It is what the council cites, if it ever comes to it, to a planning inspector or a judge.
This book asks a simple question of that arrangement: independent from whom?
The answer, across every case gathered here, is the same. The firms councils pay to tell them a school site is safe, a road’s traffic model is sound, a bypass’s business case adds up, or a supermarket won’t oversupply a town centre, are, time and again, firms with other clients, other interests, and other reasons to reach the conclusion the council needed. Sometimes that conflict is disclosed and waved through. Sometimes it is denied outright, even when the firm’s own website says otherwise. Almost never is a council found, on the record, to have turned a consultant’s advice down because the consultant was conflicted.
Two Stockport schemes anchor this book: the Harcourt Street/Vale View school at the centre of Book One in this series, and the A555/SEMMMS bypass at the centre of Book Three. Between them they account for tens of thousands of pounds a month in consultants’ fees, at least two firms whose own finances were in visible difficulty while they were being paid, one firm advising a council while suggesting political pressure be applied to that council’s own committee members, and one consultant’s alumnus who went on to help write the national planning policy framework every other council in England now has to work within. A third thread — Donald Henry’s investigation into GVA Grimley’s conduct at Castle Douglas, Scotland — shows this is not a Stockport peculiarity. It is how the system works.
Chapter One: Harcourt Street — Pressure and a Rubber-Stamped Road
Three weeks before Stockport’s Tame Valley Area Committee approved the Harcourt Street school, on 30 July 2007, GVA Grimley’s Rob Peters emailed NPS’s Chris Woolard asking whether anyone at the council could “help out” — and suggested it might be worth considering whether political pressure could be applied to committee members, through lobbying in advance of the vote. The email only came to light because I requested it under the Freedom of Information Act.
A Standards Committee ruling the following year found no evidence that any actual attempt had been made to influence the decision, but ruled that the authority’s monitoring officer should remind officers of their responsibilities when engaging consultants in future — a finding that answers the narrow question asked while leaving the wider one untouched: why was a paid planning consultant discussing how to manage elected members’ votes with a council officer in the first place? The Stockport Express covered the ruling under the headline “Rap for Council officers over planning ‘pressure’” (Peter Devine, 3 September 2008). Council Labour group leader Peter Scott said he was alarmed by the approach and wanted a thorough investigation. The Council and a GVA Grimley spokesman both denied that any political pressure had actually been applied to committee members.
Stockport Express, 3 September 2008 — Peter Devine
The site those committee members were being asked to approve was a former toxic waste tip, later found to contain lead, arsenic and brown asbestos, on which the council proposed to house 550 primary school children and 78 babies. Rob Peters is separately recorded as having suggested political pressure be brought to bear on councillors to push the application through regardless. No council officer involved in that exchange is recorded as having raised an objection to the suggestion.
None of this was pro bono advice. Stockport Council’s 2012 payment records show GVA Grimley LLP (formerly GVA Grimley, incorporating Osmond Tricks Ltd) being paid between £2,303.60 (August) and £61,890.00 (June) in a single year, including a £60,250.00 payment in June 2012 specifically for “Acquisition & Formal Valuation of Property” and a further £3,267.60 in September. Rob Peters’ own listed title — Partner, Planning, Development & Regeneration, GVA Grimley LLP, University Gate, Park Row, Bristol — places him at the most senior end of the firm advising the council on exactly this kind of decision.
Harcourt Street’s second consultant failure was quieter, and arguably more consequential for the children who ended up walking to the finished school. Faber Maunsell was paid £23,594.66 for a Transport Assessment concluding there would be no highway safety detriment from the school’s access arrangements on Mill Lane. That conclusion did not survive contact with reality: within weeks of the school’s opening in September 2011, the police were raising exactly the safety concerns the Assessment had dismissed, over drop-off arrangements that a council highways officer had himself warned, in writing, were inadequate before the decision was even made.
Put the two failures side by side and a single pattern emerges. One consultant’s advice concerned whether committee members could be managed into approving the site at all. The other concerned whether the site, once approved, would actually be safe to use. Both were paid for by the council. Both turned out to be wrong, or worse. Neither firm has, on the public record, been asked to account for it.
Chapter Two: The Bypass Consultants — Corderoy, Mouchel and the Wrong Road
The A555/SEMMMS bypass scheme, whose cost moved by hundreds of millions of pounds over two decades without ever settling, was underpinned by financial modelling from a cluster of companies clustered around a single name: Corderoy. George Corderoy LLP, Corderoy Ltd, Corderoy Project Services, Corderoy Energy, Corderoy Property Company, Corderoy International, a dormant subsidiary registered in Abu Dhabi and referred to only as CIL, and Corderoy Infrastructure Ltd all appear in the paperwork behind the scheme’s business case and business-rates modelling.
Company data pulled on two of these entities does not inspire confidence in the group’s own financial footing, let alone its judgement of anyone else’s. 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.
Asked why this group — including a dormant entity registered in Abu Dhabi — had been selected over UK-based alternatives, the council’s first answer was that establishing why would take too much time. A direct follow-up question, “Why was Corderoy chosen to do work regarding the funding of the bypass?”, was ruled potentially defamatory by the Council Solicitor and blocked from the meeting before it could be asked. The substitute answer eventually given was that Corderoy had provided “independent Quantity Surveying advice” on quantities and rates only — a description that sits awkwardly alongside a company cluster whose stated role extended to business-rates modelling for a scheme whose funding model depended, for a time, on exactly that kind of projection.
Mouchel Consulting Ltd received monthly SEMMMS payments through 2011 and 2012 — £37,344.11 in June 2011, £64,806.77 in April 2012, and £34,980.74 in July 2012 among them — including a September 2012 invoice specifically for “Environmental Impact Assessment Services re SEMMMS.” These payments continued straight through a period of serious financial difficulty at Mouchel itself: 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.
Mouchel’s name carries a heavier weight elsewhere in this series. The firm is recorded as the designer of the M60’s Denton to Middleton section — a scheme that came in roughly 50% over its £110 million budget, was delayed by ground conditions its own site investigation missed, and then flooded repeatedly after opening, at a compensation cost of £114 million the Highways Agency had set aside precisely nothing to cover. Whether Mouchel’s environmental impact work on the A555 had any bearing on that road’s own subsequent flooding is not established here — EIA work is a different discipline from drainage and structural design, and this book makes no claim beyond what the evidence supports. But the same firm’s name appearing on the design of one road that flooded, and the environmental assessment of another that has flooded since, is a coincidence this book is not willing to let pass without remark.
NPS Stockport — the council’s own arms-length property company, examined in full elsewhere in this series — was paid £47,454.50 for land and property advice, acquisition and compensation work, and landowner and resident liaison along the bypass 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 this series’ other books will already know what weight to give that reassurance.
And then there is the detail that says more than it should about the level of attention being paid to the paperwork underpinning a £350 million scheme: 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.
Chapter Three: A National Pattern — GVA Grimley, Tesco, and the Making of Planning Policy
GVA Grimley describes itself as the UK’s largest independent commercial property advisor. It is retained as a lobbying and policy consultant to the Office of Government Commerce, advising over sixty central government departments, and its actuarial arm serves as actuary to the Greater Manchester Pension Fund. “Independent” is doing a great deal of work in that description.
Donald Henry’s investigation, “Planning a New World Order,” sets out what that independence looked like in practice at Castle Douglas, Scotland, in 2005. GVA Grimley advised the local council that the town’s Co-op supermarket was “overtrading” and that there was therefore capacity for a new Tesco store — while also acting for Tesco elsewhere, a fact the firm’s own website did not hide. When the conflict was raised at the committee meeting, the firm’s representative argued there was no conflict because Grimley did not represent Tesco in Scotland specifically; the firm’s solicitors then threatened legal action over the “serious” allegations, before it emerged that the word “serious” never actually appeared in Grimley’s own fax of denial — it had been inserted, for effect, by the council’s own legal advisor when reading the response aloud to committee members.
The case drew concern well beyond Castle Douglas. Conservative MSP Alex Fergusson and Shadow Scottish Secretary Peter Duncan wrote to the council raising the risk to public confidence in the whole planning process. Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb, encountering an almost identical Grimley/Tesco arrangement at Sheringham in his own Norfolk constituency, called it “an absolutely clear conflict of interest” and told the Royal Town Planning Institute directly that he did not accept the view that avoiding representing both sides in the same case was sufficient. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s considered response to the whole affair, when it reached his desk, was that conflicts of interest of this kind were “not uncommon” — an observation that reads less like reassurance and more like an admission of exactly the problem being raised.
A complaint to the RTPI against the Grimley consultant involved, Richard Slipper, under the Institute’s own Clause 4 conflict-of-interest rule, took over three months to produce a finding: no personal breach by Mr Slipper, but an acknowledgement that “additional advice should be published” to help members, councils and the public understand “this matter” in future. Over three years later, according to Henry’s account, that promised clearer guidance had still not appeared. The 1997 Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life had already warned, in terms that read as though written for this exact case, that “the opportunities for corruption are growing with the spiralling trend towards devolution of management responsibilities,” and had recommended (Recommendation 19) that every local authority draw up a code of conduct for officers. A self-regulating professional body investigating its own member, taking three months to say nothing conclusive, and then not delivering the guidance it promised for years afterward, is not the code of conduct Nolan had in mind.
The reach of this small circle of consultants extends further than any single planning application. John Rhodes, a former GVA Compulsory Purchase Specialist in Manchester, now runs the planning consultancy QUOD, whose client list includes Taylor Wimpey. Rhodes was one of only four members of the Professional Advisory Group that produced the National Planning Policy Framework — the document that now sets the rules every council in England, including Stockport, has to operate within. A former employee of a firm this book has already shown advising both councils and the developers those councils are considering, helping write the national rulebook for how that exact kind of decision should be made, is not proof of anything improper in the NPPF itself. It is, at minimum, a question worth asking out loud, which is more than has been asked of it so far.
Even where the harm from bad advice is visible and acknowledged, the response has been to hire the same advisor again. The market towns of Halstead and Witham, having watched their high streets decline into boarded-up units after earlier planning decisions favoured out-of-town retail development — decisions taken on GVA Grimley’s own advice — responded by spending a further £40,000 commissioning GVA Grimley to study the same market and recommend how to revive it. Einstein’s definition of insanity, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result, is quoted often enough to have become a cliché. It is difficult to find a more literal illustration of it than a town paying the architect of its own decline to draw up the recovery plan.
Chapter Four: Who Regulates the Regulators?
Every case in this book shares the same structure. A council needs advice it is not equipped, or not willing, to generate in-house. It hires a private firm, at public expense, and that firm’s report becomes the evidence the council relies on to defend a decision it has often already leaned toward making. When the advice turns out to be wrong — a school judged safe that wasn’t, a road judged sound that flooded, a market judged to have capacity it didn’t — no mechanism exists to hold the advisor to account. The professional body that might have done so, the RTPI, took over three months to clear its own member of a conflict most outside observers could see plainly, and then failed for years to deliver the clearer guidance it promised. The council that hired the advisor has every institutional incentive not to revisit the question, since doing so means admitting its own decision rested on flawed advice.
And when a member of the public asks the obvious question — why this firm, on what terms, with what independence — the answer, across every case in this book, has been some version of: too time-consuming to establish, too legally risky to ask, or simply not put to the meeting at all. A question about who chose a consultant was ruled potentially defamatory in Stockport. A question about political pressure being discussed with a consultant was ruled to warrant only a reminder of officers’ responsibilities, not a wider inquiry into how that conversation came to happen in the first place.
This book has not proven, and does not claim, that any of the individuals or firms named in it acted corruptly. What it has shown, repeatedly, across two Stockport schemes and one Scottish one, is a system in which the word “independent” is applied to advice from firms with other clients, other interests, and other reasons to reach the conclusion the council needed — and in which the questions capable of testing that independence are, time and again, the ones that never get asked, or never get answered.
