12th September 2026

Shame on the appalling Romiley LibDems (again).

Sheila Oliver

Editor, The Romiley Gazette

Also by this Author

Vexatious? Moi? (Book One): Harcourt Street

Learning Law From a Lawless Council (Stockport)

Dedication

To Miss Piggy.

I don’t claim to have her good looks or luscious locks, but I do have a black belt in kickboxing. However, I would never have dared to step on the mat in high-heeled, wedge sandals. Respect.

Like her, I take no nonsense from frogs — in my case, the frogs at the top of Stockport Council.

NB: Should AI ever enable us to communicate with animals, I should like to apologise to frogs for comparing them to the panjandrums at Stockport Council. It was purely to make a point. Please don’t judge me harshly.

A Note on This Book

Vexatious? Moi? told the story of Harcourt Street: a school built on a former toxic tip, a budget that nearly doubled before the contamination was fully disclosed, a road layout that endangered children the day it opened, and a council that answered every hard question, over more than a decade, with the same word. Vexatious.

This book concerns a different piece of land, a different set of officers, and a different council administration. But the tactics are unmistakably the same — and this time they have arrived far faster.

It took years of documented obstruction before Stockport Council settled on “vexatious” as its answer to questions about Harcourt Street. At Padden Brook, the same word — and a formal, sweeping restriction on my ability to communicate with my own council — arrived within about two years of the concerns first being raised, and, on the council’s own account, applies not only to my formal information requests but to ordinary correspondence, complaints, and even questions I might ask at a public committee meeting.

This book sets out what has happened at Padden Brook, in the words of the council’s own correspondence, and asks the same question I have been asking, in one form or another, for twenty years: when a council will not answer a straightforward question about what it did, when it did it, and why, is the person asking the question really the one behaving unreasonably?

Padden Brook, running between Gorsey Brow and Green Lane (A627), Romiley, SK6 — as it used to look

The green shading on this map is the officially mapped extent of the woodland’s protection — the entire strip shown, not a scattering of individually named trees. That distinction matters throughout this book.

This book is built from primary documents — council letters, planning records, Land Registry titles, EIR and FOI correspondence, and my own photographs — gathered over more than two years. Wherever a claim in this book goes beyond what a document directly shows, it is presented as my own account rather than as established fact.

I wrote the Author’s material and directed every chapter that follows. Every chapter itself was written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, working from the documents, photographs, and guidance I provided. I am grateful for its help in telling this story.

Contents

Chapter One — The Letter

Chapter Two — Two Years, and Counting

Chapter Three — The Land and the Landowner

Chapter Four — The Wall

Chapter Five — An Address That Isn’t His

Chapter Six — A Fence, a Website, and a Question of Timing

Chapter Seven — The Dogs That Didn’t Bark in the Night. Why Not?

Chapter Eight — The Council’s Answer

Chapter Nine — What’s Under the Ground, and Who Owns It

Afterword

Chapter One: The Letter

On the morning of 24 August 2026, at eight o’clock, an email arrived from Vicki Bates, Stockport Council’s Chief Governance Officer and Monitoring Officer. It was short. It was final. And it read, in the way these things always seem to read, as though it were doing me a courtesy.

“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.”

That much I already knew. What followed was new.

“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…”

Not a request. Not a specific letter. Not a specific FOI. Every communication, on every subject touching Padden Brook or “the surrounding area,” by any method — email, letter, a question at a council meeting, a formal complaint — was to be treated the same way: diverted to a single inbox, and read, at best, once a week, by Ms Bates or a deputy.

The justification offered was volume: “hundreds” of emails over two years, said to repeat the same or similar questions. As an example of my unreasonableness, Ms Bates cited the fact that I continued to describe the land as “protected” — what she called “the correct position” having supposedly been set out to me “on a number of occasions.” She did not, in that letter or since, set out what that correct position actually is: which designation applies, which document establishes it, or on what date it was made. She simply asserted that I was wrong, and treated my continuing to disagree as evidence of unreasonable conduct rather than as an ordinary, unresolved dispute of fact.

Part of that volume, I should say plainly, is my own doing as a journalist rather than as a complainant — and the Council has never distinguished between the two. Before publishing any Romiley Gazette story about the Council, I have always written to it first, asking whether it wishes to comment or respond. That is not an aggressive act. It is standard journalistic practice, and it exists to give a public body the chance to put its position on the record before criticism of it appears in print. Every one of those routine, professional emails has been counted, alongside everything else, towards the “hundreds” that make me unreasonably persistent. A council genuinely concerned with fairness would welcome the opportunity to respond before publication. This one has counted the offer itself against me.

The letter went further still. It stated that a “significant amount” of my emails contained “abusive and defamatory content,” which I had “also publicly shared.” No email was quoted. No statement was identified. No date, no recipient, no sentence. I was told only that the material existed, that it would be shared with the Ombudsman if I escalated my complaint, and that the council reserved its right to take unspecified “legal action” against me over my “conduct.”

Ms Bates closed by noting that she had considered the impact of the restriction under the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010, and did not consider there to be any. The restriction would be reviewed in six months.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write this chapter as simple outrage, and outrage is not evidence. So consider instead what the council’s own rules say should happen before a letter like this is sent.

What the council’s own policy says

Stockport Council adopted its Unreasonable Actions by Complainants Policy in April 2026 — four months before Ms Bates’s letter. It is not a vague or aspirational document. It is specific, and in several places it reads as though it was written to prevent exactly what then happened to me.

Section 2.2: “All complaints are considered on their merits.”

Section 3.6 draws a distinction between legitimate and unreasonable persistence, and ties the latter to circumstances where a complainant continues pursuing a matter without new information, or repeatedly pursues an issue that has already been properly addressed.

Section 9.1: restricting contact should generally be a last resort, deployed only after attempts at reconciliation and warnings have been exhausted.

Section 9.4 expressly contemplates considering new complaints on their own merits, even from someone already subject to restriction.

Section 10.1: any restriction “must be tailored and proportionate to address the unreasonable actions found in each case.”

Section 10.2, in terms that could hardly be plainer: “The council should not take a blanket approach to restricting contact with services.”

Section 14 states that even correspondence placed on file without acknowledgement or reply should still be reviewed for significant new information.

A restriction covering every communication, by every method, on an entire subject and “surrounding area,” for six months, without identifying which specific actions were unreasonable or which specific statements were defamatory, is not obviously tailored to anything. It reads, on its face, like the blanket approach the council’s own policy says it should not take.

A question of timing, now answered

The destruction at Padden Brook began on 9 August 2024. Ms Bates’s letter, imposing a blanket restriction across every subject and every method of communication, is dated 24 August 2026 — two years and fifteen days later. But the word “vexatious” had already been applied to Padden Brook more than a year before that. On 2 April 2025 I asked, under the Environmental Information Regulations, whether the Council had investigated land instability at the site and which officers were involved. The request was refused as manifestly unreasonable and vexatious; my internal review request of 3 May 2025 was upheld on 1 July 2025 by the Information Governance Manager, Liz Sykes, who cited roughly 230 emails sent since 1 August 2024 and concluded that “nothing is taking place at the site of Padden Brook that the Council needs to take action on.” The Gazette reported it on 20 August 2025.

So the sequence runs: destruction begins, 9 August 2024; a single, narrow EIR question about land instability is branded vexatious within a year; and by August 2026, that branding has grown to cover every communication I might send the Council, by any method, on any aspect of the subject, indefinitely reviewed every six months. Each step used the last as its justification for the next.

At Harcourt Street, it took the best part of a decade — and an extraordinary volume of documented obstruction — before the council settled on the same word. At Padden Brook, it took a small fraction of that time. That acceleration is, in itself, a finding. It suggests a council that has learned, from experience, how quickly a difficult question can be made to disappear.

Vicki Bates’ letter of 24 August 2026, confirming the communications restriction

Chapter Two: Two Years, and Counting

To understand what Ms Bates’s letter was actually silencing, it is necessary to go back to what has, and has not, happened at Padden Brook since concerns were first raised — more than two years before that letter arrived.

The matters reported to the council were not abstract. They were specific, physical, and easy to check:

•  A derelict butty van dumped on the land, which was subsequently altered and appears to now function as a site office.

•  A table and chairs placed on the site.

•  Continuing use and occupation of land I and other residents understand to carry protected amenity status, including a W1 woodland designation.

•  Works affecting the stability of the land.

•  Damage to a retaining wall serving the road and roughly two dozen homes, including my own.

On 21 August 2026 — three days before Ms Bates’s letter — I submitted a formal Stage 1 complaint to the council, addressed to officers Katie Moores, Lisa McGrane and Michael Cullen, to the Leader, and to the planning department directly. It asked nine specific questions: what investigations had been carried out; what enforcement decisions had been recorded, and when; the current status of the case; whether the change of use from derelict van to site office had been assessed as a new planning matter; whether the table and chairs had been investigated; whether the land’s protected status had been considered; and, if no enforcement action had been taken, why not — or, if no decision had been made at all, why the matter remained open after two years.

These are not the questions of someone seeking to relitigate a planning judgement I happen to dislike. I have never disputed that the council has discretion over whether and how to enforce. What I have asked for, repeatedly, is a record: an account of what was actually investigated, what was decided, and why. A well-run planning authority ought to be able to produce that account in an afternoon. Two years on, I still do not have one.

My formal Stage 1 complaint of 21 August 2026

The closing page of the complaint, reserving my right to escalate to the Ombudsman

I noted in that complaint, and I repeat here, that the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has previously found fault with Stockport Council over unreasonable delay in a separate planning enforcement matter. This is not, in other words, an isolated failing.

Three days later came the letter that ensured those nine questions would now be read, at best, once a week.

The butty van itself has not stood still while the council has. What began as a derelict vehicle dumped on the land has visibly changed over time — sunk into mud on the verge in one state, and, in a later state, blacked out, hoarded off behind fencing, and marked with graffiti, alongside disturbed, churned ground.

The dumped butty van’s changing states over time, on the verge at Padden Brook

The table and chairs dumped on the site

Two years on, the concerns are no longer confined to correspondence between me and the council. They are visible enough that residents have taken them to a public meeting.

Residents hold up a “Protect Padden Brook” banner at a council meeting

Chapter Three: The Land and the Landowner

The current landowner at Padden Brook is Greg Hall. The destruction began on 9 August 2024. Over the two years since, on my account and that of other residents, land I understand to be protected — unstable in places, and holding up the road and footway serving some two dozen houses — has been bulldozed, stripped of vegetation almost daily, and altered, including the erection of what I believe to be an unauthorised gate and the use of a digger in a manner that damaged the root systems of protected trees.

Stockport Council’s own published records, available on its website, address the tree preservation position for this site directly. From those records, it is my position — disputed, so far without particulars, by the council — that the entire site carries protection, not merely a schedule of individually named trees. That distinction matters, because a defence built around individual trees falling outside a named list says nothing about whether the wider site, as a whole, is protected land on which this kind of activity should not be taking place at all.

This is not newly wooded ground. An overlay of a historical estate map against the modern Ordnance Survey shows the same field boundaries and the same watercourse running through this part of Bredbury Green and Hatherlow long before any of the surrounding streets existed.

A historical map of the Bredbury Green/Hatherlow area (left) overlaid against the modern OS map of the same ground (right)

Local Councillor Angela Clark was told the same day — 9 August 2024, in person and in front of a witness — that unstable land supporting twenty-four houses was being illegally bulldozed. The destruction had not been going on for weeks or months before anyone in authority was warned; it was raised on day one. To date, so far as I am aware, she has taken no action.

None of this is disputed as a matter of what physically happened on the ground; the site itself, and its condition, tell that story more plainly than any letter from the council could contradict. What is in dispute — what has been in dispute for two years — is whether Stockport Council will engage with it.

The roadside at Padden Brook: mature woodland (left) and the same stretch cleared, with disturbed bare earth (right)

A fuller sequence, taken from several angles over time, shows the same transformation is not a trick of one photograph or one point of view.

“From this: to THIS” — the site’s dense woodland, and several later views of the same ground cleared to bare, sparse verge

A shipping container placed on the site near Green Lane

A tree left leaning at the site — the kind of root disturbance residents have raised with the council

Among the felling itself, the trunks and branches are simply left stacked on the slope once cut — not the tidy, single-tree removal a routine safety felling would suggest, but a working clearance site.

Felled trunks and branches stacked on the slope at Padden Brook

The new five-bar gate installed at the site boundary, which I believe was built without planning permission

Chapter Four: The Wall

Of everything at Padden Brook, the retaining wall is the matter I consider most urgent, because it is the one with the clearest, most immediate safety consequence — and because, unusually, the risk is admitted in writing by the landowner’s own side, not merely alleged by residents.

A letter circulated to residents of Green Lane, Howard Close and Padden Brook records that structural engineers examined the retaining wall along Howard Close and advised that three sycamore trees adjacent to it should be removed, because their root systems were undermining the wall’s footings. The letter states the consequence in plain terms:

“Should the wall fail it would cause the footpath and road to subside creating considerable inconvenience to the residents i.e. possible road closure.”

The same letter records that two common ash trees, affected by ash dieback, were also to be removed, with replacement planting at a ratio of two native trees for every one felled.

This is a wall that supports a road and footway serving approximately twenty-four homes, including mine. The question this raises is not, in the first instance, an engineering question. It is a governance question: what did Stockport Council know about this risk, when did it know it, what if anything did it do about it, and why has information about the council’s own knowledge been so difficult to obtain?

I have sought that information from the council directly, including under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, on the basis that information about the condition of land and structural risk to it plainly falls within the definition of environmental information. That information has not, in my view, been properly addressed. I have separately raised the council’s handling of those requests — specifically concerning Vicki Bates, the Monitoring Officer, and Liz Sykes, the Information Governance Officer — with the Information Commissioner, on the basis that EIR and FOI requests about the wall have been refused without even being acknowledged.

On 9 August 2026, because a public body’s own conduct is not always the fastest route to accountability, I wrote directly to Zurich Insurance Group, understood to provide Stockport Council’s public liability cover, setting out the documentary evidence of the engineers’ findings and asking Zurich to confirm the council’s insurance position, to establish what if anything it had previously been told about the wall, and to preserve any relevant records. A public authority that will not answer a resident may still, eventually, have to answer its own insurer.

I do not know, as I write this, what Stockport Council knew about this wall or when it knew it. That is precisely the point. Two years into raising it, that is a fact I should not still be missing — and it is the clearest illustration in this whole affair of what a communications restriction actually costs: not administrative tidiness, but the possibility that the next piece of information about a wall holding up two dozen homes arrives too late to matter.

Machinery working the wooded bank at Howard Close, above the retaining wall

Water does not wait for a council to answer its correspondence, either. I have photographed standing water and run-off pooling across the path and verge here after rain — exactly the kind of surface water that, on ground already identified as unstable next to a wall already flagged as a subsidence risk, ought to be a standing item on someone’s inspection sheet, not something a resident has to document herself.

Standing water and run-off on the path and verge near the retaining wall

Chapter Five: An Address That Isn’t His

The proposed development at the heart of this book sits on Padden Brook itself — a real street, with houses already standing on one side of it. The scheme proposed for the wooded side does not yet have a marketing name of its own; in the planning visualisation prepared for it, it is identified only by its location: “Land at Padden Brook, Romiley, Stockport, SK6 3AS.” That visualisation shows a run of new-build brick houses, gabled and pleasant, facing onto a street that, on the wooded side, does not yet exist.

The planning visualisation for “Land at Padden Brook” (below) and the wooded site as it looked before the destruction began (above)

Directly above that rendering, in the same document, sits a photograph of the site as it looked before the destruction began — dense mature woodland running alongside the road, utility poles threaded through the canopy, nothing built. That gap, between the picture of what is intended and the wood that has since been stripped away, is the subject of this whole book.

Aerial view of the wooded strip in dispute, between Howard Close and Padden Brook Mews, before much of its vegetation was stripped

This aerial view shows the strip as it looked before large parts of that canopy were cleared. It was not simply background greenery: it was a continuous, established wildlife habitat, home to at least one protected species, running the full length of the site — not the scattered, low-value scrub that a defence built around individually named trees might suggest.

Padden Brook Mews is a different place — an existing development around the corner from the wood shown above, not the site under threat. It matters to this story for one reason only: the landowner falsely claimed to live there.

An address he does not live at

Among the documents I hold is a Stockport Council Tree Works application — made under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, in relation to trees protected by a Tree Preservation Order or in a conservation area — reference PP-13856187, concerning works at Padden Brook Mews. The applicant is named as Mr Hall.

His address, entered on the council’s own form under “Applicant Details,” is given as: Padden Brook Mews, Romiley, Stockport, SK6 3AS. He does not live there. His actual address is 1a Magda Road. The council was made aware of this discrepancy on the form itself, and, so far as I am aware, has not been troubled by it.

The Tree Works application (ref PP-13856187), showing the applicant’s address as “Padden Brook Mews, Romiley, Stockport, SK6 3AS”

Giving, as your own residential address, a development you do not live in — rather than your actual home — on a public planning form submitted to the same council that is meant to be regulating what happens on land nearby, is not a small irregularity. It is exactly the sort of detail a properly functioning planning department ought to notice, and that a council which was minded to scrutinise this application with the same energy it has applied to scrutinising my correspondence would very likely have noticed.

Bluebells in the woodchip

Back on the wooded site itself, whatever the paperwork says about its future, its present condition tells its own story. Bluebells are one of the clearest, most widely recognised indicators of ancient or long-established woodland in England — they spread slowly, and their presence signals ground that has been continuously wooded for a very long time, not scrub that sprang up in the last few decades.

Bluebells growing through wood-chip mulch beside a freshly cut tree stump on the site

I photographed bluebells and other established ground-cover plants growing directly through fresh wood-chip mulch, next to a stump that had clearly been cut recently. Whatever assessment concluded that trees here “failed to meet the criteria for protection,” it is difficult to reconcile with a woodland floor still supporting an ancient-woodland indicator species.

A tree on the site marked for felling

Elsewhere on the site, a tree stands marked for the same fate — photographed with an arrow drawn in to show precisely which one is next. Trees do not, of course, remove themselves. Each of these photographs represents a decision, made by someone, about what this woodland is for.

Chapter Six: A Fence, a Website, and a Question of Timing

Several more pieces of evidence belong in this chapter, and each shows the same pattern from a slightly different angle: a site being made harder to see into, at exactly the moment more people are trying to look.

The fence goes up

On 18 December 2025, Stockport Council’s Planning Services wrote to a neighbouring resident under reference DC/097706. The proposal being consulted on was described plainly: “Addition of fences and gates at boundary of site and 2.4m high temporary fence.” The council’s letter pinned the application to “Brook House, 1 Padden Brook, Romiley” — a specific house whose owner has nothing whatsoever to do with this case, and I mention it only because it is the address the council’s own paperwork uses for this application; it should not be read as connecting that household to anything in this book. Comments were invited by 11 January 2026. The letter closed with a now-familiar line: that due to the volume of correspondence received, the Council would not be able to reply to or acknowledge representations, though they would be “taken into account.”

The Council’s planning consultation letter for DC/097706, 18 December 2025

The fence that resulted is not a garden fence. It runs close-slatted and over head height along the site boundary, screening the works behind it from the road and from passers-by — including the dumped butty van discussed in Chapter Two and a large amount of rubbish, both still visible from the elevated vantage point of Howard Close, at the top of the retaining wall.

The fence and gates erected at the site boundary under DC/097706

A 2.4 metre fence is, on its own, an unremarkable thing for a construction site to have. What is worth noting is the timing and the effect: a site under sustained public scrutiny, subject to years of unresolved enforcement questions, has become considerably harder for residents at ground level to see into just as those questions have intensified.

Registered, and left there

The council’s own planning portal records DC/097706 (also referenced as PP-14522904) as received on 27 November 2025 and validated on 3 December 2025, with its address given simply as “Land At Padden Brook, Romiley, Stockport.” The comment period closed on 11 January 2026. As of the middle of 2026 — more than half a year after the application was validated, and months after the last resident’s comment was invited — its status still read, in the council’s own system: Registered. Not approved. Not refused. Not withdrawn. Simply registered, and left there.

On 1 June 2026 I put the question directly, in writing, to eleven recipients at once — Vicki Bates, Emma Curle, the planning department, the Leader, my MP’s office, Lisa McGrane, Emma Stubbs, Councillor Angie Clark, Councillor Rachel Bresnahan, and Michael Cullen: why hadn’t this application been decided, and did enforcement even exist at Stockport Council? I published the same question on my blog, where it remains for anyone to read.

A reader, Mabel Green, left a comment the following month asking a related question I hadn’t even raised: how had a different, later application at the same site been decided before this earlier one had even been settled? I replied on 17 July 2026 that the pattern of — to put it kindly — irregularities at Padden Brook was serious enough to warrant a sustained public record, named individuals included, addressed in particular to the Planning Officer handling the case, Dominic Harvey. That record is, in large part, this book.

A footpath that may not need diverting

The same day, 1 June 2026, I wrote separately to the Council’s Public Rights of Way team, copied to Vicki Bates, Michael Cullen, the Leader and my MP’s office, about a different application, DC/097686. The applicant had stated that a public footpath “must be diverted” to accommodate the development. My own review of the Definitive Map and publicly available PROW data did not show Footpath 5 or Footpath 6 (Bredbury & Romiley) being directly intersected or severed by that application’s boundary.

I asked the Council to confirm the exact Definitive Map alignment of any right of way potentially affected; whether any recorded right of way was legally obstructed by the proposal at all; whether the Council considered a Section 257 Town and Country Planning Act 1990 Diversion Order to be required; and, if the applicant’s reference to a diversion did not concern a recorded Definitive Map footpath, whether it instead concerned only an informal or permissive path outside the legal PROW network.

These are not abstract questions. A statutory diversion order carries legal weight and a defined process; an informal path does not. If an applicant’s public-facing justification for altering access to a site rests on a diversion that the law does not actually require, that is a materially different thing from a genuine, necessary diversion — and residents, and the Council’s own decision-makers, are entitled to know which one they are dealing with.

The noticeboard, before and after

Planning law relies, in part, on the public actually being told what is happening on a site near them — traditionally through a site notice, displayed where passers-by can read it. When I first photographed the site’s new wooden noticeboard, well-built and clearly recently installed on fresh posts, it was blank. It has since been updated, and now displays notices about the proposed housing development.

The noticeboard at the site

I raise this not to suggest the board is still empty — it isn’t — but because the gap between the two states is itself worth noting: for a period, a resident walking past this board would have learned nothing at all about what was planned or underway on the land behind it. Whether that gap was an oversight or simply the order in which things were done, it meant the public information arrived only after the fence, the noticeboard’s frame, and a good deal of the clearance work already had.

A website that does not work

When residents are told to rely on the council’s own systems for information — as the December 2025 consultation letter does, directing objectors to the Council’s online planning portal for “any up-to-date information” — it is reasonable to expect that system to function. I attempted to check the status of applications relating to this site on Stockport Council’s planning application search tool and was met with the following:

Stockport Council’s planning application search tool, returning a server error

“A server problem prevented the webpage from displaying. Try again later.” I have no reason to think this was anything other than an ordinary technical fault. But when a council restricts a resident’s ability to ask questions directly, and then directs that same resident to a website that will not load, the practical effect is the same either way: no information reaches the person asking for it.

Still moving earth

The works have not stopped. I have an earlier photograph of a mechanical digger operating on the wooded bank at the site — the same sloped ground, immediately above the retaining wall discussed in Chapter Four, that structural engineers have already linked to a risk of footpath and road subsidence. At the time this photograph was taken, the digger was working within what should have been a protected wildlife exclusion zone.

An earlier photograph of a digger working on the wooded bank at the site, within the protected wildlife exclusion zone

Whatever else is or is not resolved about Padden Brook, this much is not in dispute: on land already flagged for slope instability next to a wall already flagged as a safety risk, this kind of work has been ongoing for two years, and no one has yet given me a clear account of what oversight, if any, governs it.

Chapter Seven: The Dogs That Didn’t Bark in the Night. Why Not?

In Sherlock Holmes’s story “Silver Blaze,” the detective is asked whether any point of the case strikes him. He replies: “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” The dog did nothing in the night. That, Holmes explains, was the curious incident — because the dog should have barked, and did not, and its silence was the clue that mattered.

Padden Brook has its own dogs that didn’t bark. Several people, in several different roles, have had the opportunity — the responsibility, in fact — to ask a hard question, order an investigation, or simply respond. This chapter is about them: who they are, what their role gave them the power to do, and what they did instead, which in most cases so far has been nothing at all. More names will be added as the evidence for each one is assembled.

Vicki Bates — Chief Governance Officer and Monitoring Officer

Vicki Bates, Stockport Council Monitoring Officer, speaking at a council meeting

Ms Bates’s role already runs through this book: she is the author of the 24 August 2026 letter examined in Chapter One, which declared all my communications on Padden Brook — by any method, on any aspect of the subject — unreasonably persistent, and which stated that my FOI and EIR requests would not even be acknowledged. As Monitoring Officer, her responsibilities include the Council’s own lawful and proper conduct. The letter she sent does not read as the action of someone straining to keep that conduct within its own rules.

This is not the first time Ms Bates’s office has reached for that word. It was raised in connection with the Harcourt Street contamination and safety concerns explored in “Vexatious? Moi?”, and separately, questions about missing community sports facilities and multi-million-pound financial inconsistencies were reportedly branded “vexatious” by Ms Bates and her deputy, Michelle Dodds, as far back as 2019. A pattern repeated across cases, years, and administrations is no longer a coincidence of one difficult resident; it is a house style.

Michelle Dodds — Deputy Monitoring Officer

Ms Dodds is reported to have joined Ms Bates in applying the “vexatious” label to earlier questions about missing sports facilities and financial inconsistencies. Her role sits within the same office whose current position on Padden Brook is set out above. She is also a figure in the Michael Parnell case, the subject of a separate book, where I understand her conduct towards Mr Parnell was similarly unsympathetic.

Liz Sykes — Information Governance Manager

Ms Sykes conducted the internal review that, on 1 July 2025, upheld the refusal of my EIR request about land instability at Padden Brook — the first formal “vexatious” finding on this subject, discussed in Chapter One. Her review acknowledged that Padden Brook’s condition is a matter of public interest, and upheld the refusal anyway, on the basis that the burden of roughly 230 emails since August 2024 outweighed it. She has also been named, alongside Ms Bates, in a complaint to the Information Commissioner over the Council’s handling of information requests concerning the retaining wall.

Emma Curle — Chief Planning Officer

Emma Curle, Stockport Council’s Chief Planning Officer

As Chief Planning Officer, Ms Curle sits over the department that has, on my account, failed for more than two years to give a clear answer to nine straightforward questions about enforcement at Padden Brook — questions restated in my Stage 1 complaint of 21 August 2026, reproduced in Chapter Two. Responsibility for whether this department investigates, records, and explains its decisions runs, ultimately, to the person at its head.

Dominic Harvey — Planning Officer

Mr Harvey is the Planning Officer named in connection with DC/097706, the fence and gates application discussed in Chapter Six — an application that sat as merely “Registered” for more than half a year after validation, with no decision, refusal, or withdrawal recorded. He is also the officer to whom I addressed my 17 July 2026 statement of intent to keep a sustained public record of what has happened at Padden Brook. I do not yet have a photograph of Mr Harvey; if one becomes available it will be added here.

Michael Cullen — Chief Executive

Michael Cullen, Stockport Council’s Chief Executive

Mr Cullen was among the recipients of my 21 August 2026 complaint, addressed to him directly as Chief Executive alongside the Leader and named planning officers. As the Council’s most senior officer, he is ultimately accountable for how it treats residents who raise sustained, documented concerns — including, eventually, whether a restriction as sweeping as the one in Chapter One was ever an appropriate or proportionate response. I have had no indication that he has intervened.

Mark Roberts — Council Leader

Mark Roberts, Leader of Stockport Council

The Leader was one of the addressees of my 21 August 2026 Stage 1 complaint, sent to leader@stockport.gov.uk directly. Every letter and restriction described in this book has been issued in the name of a council he leads. I have seen nothing from him personally addressing any of it.

I have, however, had one personal encounter with him. On 1 November 2025, in Romiley Precinct, Mr Roberts confronted me in public and shouted, calling me “toxic.” My husband, who is 75, witnessed it and was shocked enough to step in himself, telling him: “Don’t you speak to my wife like that.” I wrote about it publicly on 21 November 2025, noting that Mr Roberts had, despite weeks of my asking, provided no evidence for any accusation against me. A council leader who responds to a resident’s documented, two-year concerns by shouting at her in a shopping precinct has not, on that evidence, earned the trust his own residents are asked to place in him.

Lisa Smart — Member of Parliament

Lisa Smart MP, quoted: “We should build on derelict sites not our green space!”

Ms Smart is on record, in print, saying plainly: “We should build on derelict sites not our green space!” — and the same coverage records that she and the local Liberal Democrats twice challenged the Conservatives to join them in voting down over-development plans at the Council. Both times, they refused.

The principle, then, is not in question: my MP is happy to be quoted defending green space in general terms. Padden Brook is a specific, documented, two-year case of exactly the kind of loss she says she opposes, on her own doorstep, and I am not aware of her having lifted a finger over it. A general commitment to green space that stops short of the green space actually under threat in your own constituency is not the same thing as acting on the principle. That gap is its own kind of silence.

That gap had a concrete cost in September 2025, when a resident stood outside Ms Smart’s constituency office holding an A4 sheet of paper reading “Useless Local Councillors,” over wildlife crime and destruction at Padden Brook. The protest was peaceful. Police were called, and attended — then were called again roughly ten minutes later, and attended a second time. No arrests were made. Ms Smart has campaigned nationally on “Policing Fit for the Future,” a platform built on the smarter, more proportionate use of stretched police resources. Two call-outs for one resident holding a sign is not obviously what that looks like in practice, and it is exactly the kind of outcome that follows when concerns are left to fester rather than engaged with early.

Councillor Angela Clark

Councillor Angela Clark

Councillor Clark’s role in this book is set out in Chapter Three: she was told, on 9 August 2024, in person and in front of a witness, that unstable land holding up twenty-four houses was being illegally bulldozed — on the very day the destruction began. To date, so far as I am aware, she has taken no action.

At a September 2024 Werneth Area Council meeting, Cllr Mark Roberts told residents that officers had spoken to the landowner about tree and nature obligations, and credited Cllr Clark and myself with getting Tree Preservation Orders placed on the mature trees. The land was cleared anyway. An anonymous resident later told the Gazette that the TPOs were only ever placed on individual trees, not the site as a whole, because Cllr Clark “did not go far enough” — and called the council “a laughing stock” as a result. Whether or not that verdict is fair to her personally, the outcome speaks for itself: partial protection, followed by clearance of everything the partial protection didn’t cover.

Separately, I wrote up a photo opportunity in which Cllr Clark was pictured clearing some three to four feet of a small gulley in Romiley village, posing with a large sod of grass she had apparently removed. Residents who know the gulley say it has never had substantial grass growth to that extent, and a second photograph taken immediately afterwards shows no comparable vegetation nearby. A formal question went to the Werneth Area Committee asking why only a few feet were cleared, whether it achieved anything, and where the sod of grass in the photograph actually came from. None of this is a large matter on its own. But a councillor who can find time for a stage-managed few feet of gulley, while a documented, two-year danger to twenty-four homes goes unaddressed on her own patch, is choosing where her effort is seen to go.

Councillor Rachel Bresnahan

Councillor Rachel Bresnahan

Councillor Bresnahan has not responded to me at all in over two years. Not an acknowledgement, not a holding reply, not a refusal — nothing. Of everyone in this chapter, hers may be the simplest kind of silence: not a considered position, not a defended decision, just an absence.

Lisa McGrane — Planning Enforcement

Ms McGrane was among the addressees of my 21 August 2026 Stage 1 complaint and my 1 June 2026 letter asking why DC/097706 remained undecided. She is described in council terms as an Enforcement Officer. I use that description advisedly: over more than two years of documented enforcement questions at Padden Brook — the butty van, the table and chairs, the site occupation, the felling, the fence, the undecided applications — I am not aware of a single instance of enforcement action having actually been taken. Readers may draw their own conclusions about what the title is doing in that sentence.

More officials will be added to this chapter as their roles and their silence are documented.

Chapter Eight: The Council’s Answer

This book has, so far, been mostly about silence — unanswered questions, undecided applications, a communications restriction that stopped the questions being asked at all. It would be wrong to leave the impression that the Council has never engaged with the substance. On 8 October 2024, Vicki Bates wrote to me with a considered, substantive response — prepared, she said, by Emma Curle, then styled Chief Planning Officer — addressing my interpretation of what “amenity land” means at Padden Brook. It deserves to be set out in full, and then examined.

What the Council said

The response made several distinct points. “Amenity land” is not a term formally defined in planning legislation or guidance, and the development plan does not allocate any land under that specific label — though land allocated in other ways, such as open space, may still have amenity value. The woodland running along the western side of Padden Brook is defined as a Local Wildlife Site under the local plan, which brings it within saved Unitary Development Plan policy NE1.2, covering Sites of Nature Conservation Importance.

On the 1974 refusal I hold — discussed in Chapter Three — the Council agreed that the land was originally identified as an amenity area, as part of the wider residential development permitted in the early 1960s. But it made a legal distinction I had not fully allowed for: that original permission has not been revoked, but its existence does not, on the Council’s reading, prevent a later application for a different use, nor does it prevent works that do not themselves require planning permission.

On the loss of wildlife, the Council’s position was that the matter had been referred to Greater Manchester Police, who did not consider a crime had been committed; that where an impact relates to planning consent, the enforcement team can investigate a breach of control, but that “there has been no enforcement action required or undertaken”; and that anything falling outside planning legislation is a matter for the police or for Natural England’s protected-species licensing enforcement team, with prosecution ultimately a police decision, not the Council’s. The Council added that its Neighbourhoods team had visited the site “on many occasions recently” and found no work carried out by the landowner that should not have been, and denied that any restrictions were in place on the land, contrary to what I had suggested.

From “no protection” to three protections

It is worth being precise about how far this admission travelled, because it did not arrive freely. At the outset of this dispute, I was told the land had no protection at all. That was the Council’s starting position. It is not its position now.

Between the 1974 refusal I hold, the woodland’s Tree Preservation Order, and this 8 October 2024 letter alone, the Council has now confirmed, in writing, on the record: that the site is Local Wildlife Site, subject to saved UDP policy NE1.2; that it carries W1 woodland protection; and that it was originally identified as protected visual amenity land under the 1963 permission referred to in the 1974 refusal. Three separate protections, admitted one at a time, each only after I had located the underlying document and put it to the Council directly. None of them were volunteered. Every one of them had to be dug out.

Where that leaves the argument

I want to be fair to this response, because it is more than the Council has managed on several other questions in this book, and it is worth taking on its own terms rather than dismissing it. It confirms, in the Council’s own words, that the woodland is a designated Local Wildlife Site under a live planning policy — which is not nothing. It also draws a genuinely correct legal distinction: an old, unrevoked permission for one use does not, by itself, forbid every later change.

But the response also illustrates the pattern this book keeps returning to. On wildlife crime, responsibility is placed with the police, who found nothing; on enforcement, responsibility is placed with a process that has taken no action; on the underlying protection of the land, the emphasis falls on what a policy label does not formally guarantee, rather than on what the designation as a Local Wildlife Site — the Council’s own words — is supposed to mean in practice. Each individual answer is reasonable enough in isolation. Together, they describe a site that is officially recognised as ecologically important and formally protected under adopted policy, on which, according to the body responsible for protecting it, nothing has happened that anyone needs to do anything about.

That is the gap this book is about. Not whether any single letter from the Council is wrong on its own terms — several are careful and technically defensible — but whether the cumulative effect of those careful, technically defensible answers, over more than two years, has been to protect Padden Brook, or simply to explain, at length, why nothing has been done to.

Chapter Nine: What’s Under the Ground, and Who Owns It

A historic wire works

On 14 June 2026 I wrote to Planning.DC, Vicki Bates, the Leader, Emma Curle, my MP’s office, Katie Moores and Liz Sykes, raising a concern that had not, so far as I could see, been addressed anywhere in the papers for application DC/097786: the site was formerly home to a wire works. Wire works are typically associated with a specific, well-documented set of contaminants — heavy metals including lead, zinc, copper, cadmium, nickel and chromium; hydrocarbons, oils and greases; pickling acids; coal ash, clinker and furnace residues; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; and asbestos.

This matters at Padden Brook specifically because of what already runs beneath and around the site: historical streams, culverts, wells, marshy ground and standing water, any of which could act as a pathway carrying contamination well beyond the original works. I asked the Council to require a Phase 1 contaminated land assessment covering the wire works history, followed, if warranted, by an intrusive Phase 2 investigation — soil, groundwater and sediment sampling, testing for the specific contaminants listed above, and an assessment of any culverts, drains, watercourses or made ground affected — with a remediation strategy required before any permission is granted.

Readers of “Vexatious? Moi?” will recognise the shape of this concern immediately. Harcourt Street was built on a former toxic tip after early soil tests found nothing, only for later tests — commissioned for an unrelated planning reason — to find arsenic, lead and asbestos, by which point government money was already spent and committed. I am not saying the same outcome is inevitable at Padden Brook. I am saying that a council which had genuinely learned from Harcourt Street would treat a former wire works, sitting above culverts and historically marshy ground, as a question to be answered before permission is granted, not after.

Ground that has moved before

The same application drew a separate objection from me, on 23 June 2026, concerning the site’s basic suitability for building at all. The scheme would require removing roughly 2,000 tonnes of material from a slope to create a development platform, with the proposed dwellings sited at the lower part of that slope. I cited existing evidence of ground movement nearby — a public footpath at the top of the slope reportedly subsided, as has a neighbouring driveway — and a geotechnical investigation carried out about a hundred yards away (refs DC/065326 and DC/076213), which found variable alluvial deposits, soft and compressible soils, boggy ground in parts, and recommended piled foundations into bedrock, noting that the compressible layer’s thickness varied significantly across the site it covered.

This is an outline application. The detail that would normally reassure a resident that a slope like this has been properly assessed does not yet exist. I asked the Council to require further geotechnical and slope-stability evidence before determining the application, rather than after building has begun — which is precisely the order Harcourt Street got wrong.

Who actually owns it

Land Registry records (titles MAN441856 and MAN443779, obtained 3 July 2025) show that the freehold and leasehold of the Padden Brook land were both acquired by John Greg Hall — the same Mr Hall named throughout this book — and Alison Hall, in June 2025. The lease itself is unusually specific for a supposedly ordinary residential covenant: it permits only dwellinghouses with suitable outbuildings of a minimum annual letting value of £35, and requires the landlord’s prior written approval of plans and specifications before anything is built.

Stockport Council’s legal department has clarified that such a covenant is enforceable only by the landlord against the tenant — and since the same individuals now hold both the landlord’s and the tenant’s interest, enforcement between them is, in the Council’s words, “effectively redundant.” But the Council was equally clear that the covenant itself has not disappeared: it remains a binding legal obligation attached to the land, and any development would still require planning permission in the ordinary way, covenant or no covenant. A restriction that once meant something, reduced to a formality because the same person now stands on both sides of it, is one more small example of protection on paper failing to translate into protection on the ground.

“Developer blight”

On 21 November 2024, Stockport Council passed a motion aimed at tackling what it called “developer blight”: landowners who let a site decay, on the theory that a weary community will eventually accept almost any change just to see the land used again. The motion proposed real teeth — Compulsory Purchase Orders to let the Council take over neglected sites; reversing the burden of proof, so landowners must show they are improving a site rather than the Council having to prove they are not; tax penalties for land left to blight a community; and powers to convert reclaimed sites into public parks or nature reserves.

I have put it to Emma Curle and Vicki Bates directly: is Padden Brook not a textbook case of exactly what that motion was written to stop? There were no cranes, no diggers, no half-built homes here before the events in this book — just steady, unremarked decline: vegetation stripped or left to overgrow, boundaries and access points neglected, wildlife habitats disturbed, until a housing scheme starts to look, to a tired community, like the lesser evil. Under the powers the Council itself voted for, it could have issued a Section 215 notice requiring the land’s appearance to be improved, taxed the owner for keeping it in a neglected state, or pursued a CPO to bring it back into community or environmental use. As of writing, I am still waiting for a response.

Afterword

This has been Part Two of what could become a very long series about the abuses of the over-paid, over-mighty and under-regulated rapscallions at Stockport Council — past, and presumably future. Some of the people appear again and again.

I have had my name publicly blackened for a long time in order to cover up their sometimes criminal and almost always dubious actions. I don’t have to tolerate that, and I shan’t.