FRESH FORMAL COMPLAINT: CURRENT, ONGOING STATUS OF PADDEN BROOK PLANNING ENFORCEMENT AS AT 24TH SEPTEMBER 2026
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to raise a new, current complaint about the status of the Padden Brook planning enforcement matter as it stands today. This complaint concerns the present, ongoing position not a repeat of matters already raised in my Stage 1 complaint of 21 August 2026, which I recognise has already been through your complaints process and considered separately by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (ref 25 017 921).
Since that complaint, and to the best of my knowledge, the underlying enforcement case at Padden Brook remains unresolved. This letter is a fresh complaint about that continuing state of affairs, as it exists today 24th September 2026, not about the historic period already considered.
What I am asking
Please confirm the current status of the Padden Brook enforcement case as of the date of this letter 24th September 2026 specifically, whether any decision has now been reached, and if not, why not.
Please confirm whether any site visit, inspection, or assessment has taken place since your last update to me, and if so, what it found.
Please confirm whether the Council’s position on the land’s protected status (Local Wildlife Site, W1 woodland, and protected amenity land) has changed, and if any enforcement decision now reflects all three designations.
Please confirm when the six-month review of the communications restriction referred to in Vicki Bates’s letter of 24 August 2026 is due, and confirm that this specific letter a fresh complaint about the current, ongoing status of an unresolved matter will be treated as a new complaint on its own merits, not folded into the existing restriction without individual consideration, consistent with the Council’s own April 2026 policy that restrictions must be proportionate and not applied as a blanket measure.
I would be grateful for a substantive response addressing each point above. I am raising this now, as a new complaint about the present position, specifically so that if it remains unresolved, any future complaint to the Ombudsman is timely and cannot be characterised as late.
Please confirm receipt and provide a complaint reference number.
Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman PO Box 4771 Coventry CV4 0EH Reference 25 017 921 Dear Rayne Wilson, RE: COMPLAINT REFERENCE 25 017 921 REQUEST FOR RECONSIDERATION Thank you for your letter of 21 September 2026 and the enclosed final decision statement. I am writing to ask that this decision be reconsidered, on two specific points where I believe the assessment does not reflect the actual position.
This is a continuing matter, not a stale historic one The decision treats my complaint as “late” on the basis that the underlying issues have been ongoing for over two years, and states there is “no evidence these matters have caused an ongoing significant personal injustice.” I would ask you to reconsider this. The matters I raised are not a single historic event that occurred more than 12 months before I complained to you – they are a continuing state of affairs that remains unresolved today. The land at Padden Brook remains, as of the date of this letter, in the same unresolved enforcement position it was in when I first raised it. The injustice is not something that happened once and ended; it is ongoing, current, and continuing to affect the land and the residents around it every day the enforcement case remains open without explanation. I would respectfully submit that the 12- month lateness rule under sections 26B and 34D of the Local Government Act 1974 is designed to catch complaints about discrete past events, not to bar scrutiny of a situation the complainant says is still actively unresolved at the time of the complaint.
2
The Council’s own reference to “criminal matters” was not investigated Paragraph 8 of the assessment records that the Council “informed Mrs X that some of the matters she has raised are criminal matters and should be referred to the police.” This point does not appear to have been explored further in the assessment. I would ask the Ombudsman to consider whether it was appropriate for the Council to identify potentially criminal conduct on protected land and, on the evidence available to me, take no further steps of its own and whether that response was itself part of the maladministration I have complained about, rather than a satisfactory answer to it. What I am asking I ask that the decision be reconsidered in light of the above, specifically:
Whether the “late complaint” finding is appropriate given that the underlying matter is continuing and unresolved, not historic; and
Whether the Council’s own acknowledgement that some matters raised were potentially criminal was adequately considered in reaching the “unlikely to find fault” conclusion on the communications restriction. I recognise the Ombudsman is not obliged to change its decision, and I am not asking you to revisit matters that were properly and fully considered. I am asking specifically because I believe the “late” characterisation does not fit a situation I have told you, and continue to tell you, is ongoing. I would be grateful for your response at your convenience, quoting the reference above. Yours sincerely, Sheila Oliver
My book on the subject –
3
VEXATIOUS? MOI?
Book 7
The Wall of Silence: How Stockport Council Blocks the Questions It
Doesn’t Want to Answer
Sheila Oliver Editor, Romiley Gazette
For Our Vicki
4 Other Books in This Series Book One: Harcourt Street / Vale View Primary School — a primary school built on a former toxic waste tip in North Reddish; contamination, undersized capacity, traffic danger, and the missing Sport England playing fields. Book Two: Padden Brook — a protected woodland in Romiley cleared tree by tree through a sequence of small planning applications, and the communications restriction that followed sustained questioning of it. Book Three: The A555 / SEMMMS (“The Bent Bypass”) — the Manchester Airport Relief Road’s rising cost, its consultants, its consultation, and the flooding that has closed it almost every year since it opened. Book Four: Sandringham Road — a flood-prone former garage site in Cheadle Hulme, disputed land- use claims, and the six playing-field parking spaces that were never actually approved. Book Five: Offerton Precinct — two decades of disrepair under Tenbest Limited’s ownership, a misleading Freedom of Information response, and the covenant that made the site unbuildable for housing all along. Book Six: The Marple Money — the £20 million Levelling Up Fund-backed Marple Active Communities Hub, and a councillor’s rapid rise to a Cabinet role overseeing it. Book Eight: The Foggbrook Files — the former Trident Foams site, the neighbouring Foggbrook/Blackstone Road landfill, and the ongoing silence over the Compstall Mill contamination investigation. Also in this series: “Learning Law From a Lawless Council (Stockport)”, the story of Michael Parnell, the Stockport Town Hall protestor.
5 A Note on This Book This book is built from primary documents — Council letters, Freedom of Information and Environmental Information Regulations responses, Ombudsman correspondence, planning application records, committee minutes, and screenshots of the Council’s own systems taken in real time — gathered across nearly two decades of campaigning and reporting on Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council. Unlike the earlier books in this series, which each follow a single case from beginning to end, this book asks a different question: taken together, what do Harcourt Street, Padden Brook, Offerton Precinct, Sandringham Road, the A555, the Michael Parnell case and the Marple Active Communities Hub actually have in common? The answer, this book argues, is not simply that the Council has made mistakes in each of them — all councils make mistakes — but that a recognisable, repeating machinery exists for absorbing scrutiny before it can do its work: officers and members labelling persistent questioners “vexatious” or “unreasonable,” correspondence quietly diverted to inboxes read only occasionally, and information systems that are, again and again, simply not there when a resident, a journalist or a councillor tries to use them. Where this book draws a connection between cases, or characterises a pattern, that is the author’s own analysis, clearly signalled as such. Where it states a fact — a date, a figure, the wording of a letter — that fact is drawn from a document in the author’s possession. Full case detail for each individual investigation remains in its own dedicated book in this series; this volume is the connective tissue between them.
6 Contents Introduction: A Pattern, Not a Coincidence Chapter One: The Monitoring Officer — Vicki Bates and the Architecture of “Vexatious” Chapter Two: The Vexatious Files — Seven Cases, One Machine Chapter Three: The Website Is Down When You Need It Most Chapter Four: What the Pattern Adds Up To Appendix A: The Padden Brook Restriction Letter (24 August 2026) Appendix B: The Original Complaint (21 August 2026) Appendix C: The Mapping System, Caught Failing Twice Appendix D: The Ombudsman’s Decision (21 September 2026)
7 Introduction: A Pattern, Not a Coincidence Every council makes decisions residents disagree with. Every campaigner who pushes hard enough, for long enough, eventually hears that they are being difficult. What follows in this book is not a complaint that Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council has occasionally got things wrong. It is a record, assembled case by case and document by document over many years, that the Council has developed a consistent method for insulating its decisions from the kind of sustained scrutiny that might otherwise expose them — and that this method has been applied, in strikingly similar language and through strikingly similar routes, to entirely unrelated matters: a primary school built over a former toxic tip, a protected woodland being cleared tree by tree, a shopping precinct left to rot for two decades, a garage site prone to flooding, a half-billion-pound bypass that floods on schedule every winter, the treatment of a named individual who has since died, and the rapid elevation of a councillor to a cabinet role overseeing a £20 million grant. The common thread running through all of these is not any single wrongdoing, proven or alleged, at any single site. It is process: the way the Council responds when someone persists in asking what happened, who decided it, and why. Three elements of that process recur so often across such different subject matter that they can no longer be treated as separate stories. They are the subject of this book’s three central chapters: the use of “vexatious” and “unreasonable actions” designations to stop questions being answered at all; the specific role of the Council’s Monitoring Officer, Vicki Bates, in applying and defending that designation across more than one unrelated case; and a persistent, well-documented unreliability in the Council’s own public information systems — planning portals, decision notices, mapping tools — that fails, over and over, at the precise moments residents most need to check what the Council has actually done. None of this is offered as proof of any single act of corruption. Much of it is offered as a pattern the reader can weigh for themselves, set out with dates, reference numbers and the Council’s own words wherever they survive. Where the author draws a conclusion that goes beyond what a document shows, this book says so.
8 Chapter One: The Monitoring Officer — Vicki Bates and the Architecture of “Vexatious” A Council’s Monitoring Officer occupies an unusual position. The role exists, in law, to safeguard lawfulness and good administration — to be, in effect, the conscience of the organisation. At Stockport, that role has been held by Vicki Bates, whose title is given in Council correspondence as Chief Governance Officer and Monitoring Officer, Corporate and Support Services (and, in earlier correspondence, Assistant Director – Legal & Democratic Governance / Monitoring Officer, Legal Department). It is Bates’s name that appears on the two decisions this chapter examines most closely: the designation of a resident’s Padden Brook correspondence as “unreasonably persistent,” and the earlier, related history of Harcourt Street correspondence being ruled “vexatious” by the same office over a period stretching back more than a decade. The Padden Brook Restriction On 24 August 2026, Bates wrote to confirm two things. First, that all of the author’s Freedom of Information and Environmental Information Regulations requests concerning Padden Brook would in future be deemed vexatious and would not be acknowledged. Second, that all other communications concerning Padden Brook and the surrounding area would be treated as unreasonably persistent under the Council’s own Unacceptable Actions by Complainants Policy — with future emails diverted to a dedicated inbox, read only weekly, by Bates herself or a deputy. The letter cited hundreds of emails sent over roughly two years, the impact on council resources, and what it called “abusive and defamatory content” that had also been “publicly shared” — without, at any point, specifying which communications were abusive or defamatory, or on what basis. Bates stated she had considered the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010 and found no adverse impact. She also reserved the Council’s right to take legal action over the author’s conduct. What the letter did not do is engage with the substance of what had been asked. The underlying correspondence it drew a line under included a formal Stage 1 complaint, submitted three days earlier on 21 August 2026, asking straightforward administrative questions: what investigation had the Council undertaken into two years of unresolved planning enforcement concerns at Padden Brook; what decisions had been recorded; why had the case remained open for so long. Those questions have not, at the time of writing, been substantively answered. Both letters are reproduced in full at Appendix A and Appendix B, so the reader can judge for themselves whether the questions asked were unreasonable, and whether the response actually answered them. The Council’s Own Policy, Turned Against Itself The irony documented in this book is that the Council’s own April 2026 policy on unreasonable complainant actions explicitly states that restrictions of this kind should be a last resort, tailored and proportionate to the specific behaviour, and never applied as a blanket measure. The author’s
9 formal complaint to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, submitted the same day as Bates’s restriction letter, argues in detail — citing the policy’s own sections 2.2, 3.6, 9.1, 9.4, 10.1, 10.2 and 14 — that a blanket diversion of all future correspondence on an entire subject, read only once a week by the very officer who imposed the restriction, cannot meet that test. The Ombudsman complaint sets out a wider set of grievances: prolonged delay and inadequate investigation of the underlying enforcement concerns; the Council’s failure ever to specify the legal basis on which it disputed the land’s protected status, given that Padden Brook’s woodland carries not one but three separate protections — Local Wildlife Site status, W1 woodland designation, and protected amenity land dating to a 1963 permission — protections the Council originally denied existed at all, before eventually admitting each of them in turn, one by one, only as the author’s own research uncovered them. A Pattern That Predates Padden Brook The Padden Brook restriction did not emerge from nothing. A near-identical mechanism — email correspondence diverted, contact with individual officers barred, and the label “vexatious” applied — was used against the author’s Harcourt Street correspondence years earlier, beginning with a formal “vexatious” finding on an Environmental Information Regulations request of 2 April 2025 concerning land instability at Padden Brook, upheld on internal review on 1 July 2025 by Information Governance Manager Liz Sykes, citing roughly 230 emails sent since August 2024 and the case law in Dransfield and Craven — the same legal framework used to justify silence, years apart, on two entirely different subjects. Going back further still, the Harcourt Street correspondence itself carries a documented history of council figures — the Council Leader personally, the Council Solicitor, committee chairs — ruling successive questions “vexatious” before they ever reached a public meeting: in November 2012, in June 2012, in December 2012, in June 2013, each time blocking a question from being put to the Executive at all, rather than being answered and found wanting. A blog piece the author later wrote about Bates’s “renewed scrutiny” over Padden Brook explicitly links her handling of that case to her earlier handling of concerns the author raised about missing community sports facilities and financial inconsistencies at Harcourt Street — concerns Bates and her deputy, Michelle Dodds, are said to have labelled “vexatious” as far back as 2019. The author’s position, set out at length in the Harcourt Street book in this series, is that the concerns dismissed as vexatious at that time — about school undersizing, about contamination, about traffic danger to small children — were subsequently each proven correct by independent events: a capacity shortfall admitted by the Council’s own 2012 committee papers; asbestos and heavy metals found on further testing after initial soil tests found none; and, most gravely, a fatal road accident involving the author’s own child, which she asks this book to record as directly connected to the traffic dangers she had raised and been told were vexatious to keep asking about. The Ombudsman’s Answer On 21 September 2026, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman wrote to confirm its final decision on the Padden Brook complaint (ref 25 017 921): it would not investigate. Two reasons were given. First, that the complaint was “late” — the underlying issues had been ongoing for more
10 than two years, and the Ombudsman generally will not exercise discretion to investigate matters raised more than 12 months after they arose, finding “no evidence these matters have caused an ongoing significant personal injustice.” Second, on the communications restriction specifically, the Ombudsman found the Council had “provided Mrs X with reasons for its decision and has carried out an annual review of the decision in line with its policy,” and concluded an investigation would be “unlikely to result in finding fault with the Council’s actions.” One further detail in the Ombudsman’s assessment is worth recording here rather than passing over. At paragraph 8, the decision notes that the Council “has informed Mrs X that some of the matters she has raised are criminal matters and should be referred to the police.” The assessment does not appear to explore this further, or ask what, if anything, was actually done with a criminal referral on land the Council itself has now admitted carries three separate protective designations. The author’s own view, offered here as analysis rather than as an established finding, is that a decision built on “lateness” sits uneasily with a complaint about a matter the complainant has always described, and continues to describe, as unresolved and ongoing rather than historic. Whether that view is right is now the subject of a formal request for reconsideration, and a fresh complaint addressing only the current, present-day status of the enforcement case — deliberately framed so that it cannot, this time, be characterised as late. The full text of the Ombudsman’s decision is reproduced at Appendix D. The Question This Chapter Leaves Open Whether Vicki Bates’s decisions in any individual case were correct on their own terms is, in each instance, a matter this book leaves to the Ombudsman, the Information Commissioner, and ultimately the reader. What this chapter documents is narrower and, the author would argue, more troubling: that the same officer, applying the same label, using the same legal justification, has now done this twice — once in a case where the underlying concerns were later shown to be substantially correct, and once in a case that remains open. A pattern repeated is no longer, on its own, a coincidence; it is a method. This book’s task is to describe that method plainly enough that others outside Stockport can recognise it if they see it applied to them.
11 Chapter Two: The Vexatious Files — Seven Cases, One Machine Each of the cases summarised below has its own dedicated book in this series, where the full documentary record is set out. What follows is a short digest of each, written specifically to show how the same mechanisms — delay, the “vexatious” label, blocked questions, and information that arrives too late to matter — recur across subject matter that has nothing else in common. Harcourt Street / Vale View Primary School (Book One) A primary school built on a site with a documented history as a former toxic waste tip, where the Department of the Environment itself refused three purchase-notice applications in 1974 on the grounds the land was “tipped land and unsuitable for building” — a finding the Council’s own Assistant Director of Town Planning reversed three years later. Initial soil testing found no contamination; further testing, only carried out to satisfy an unrelated public inquiry, found lead, arsenic and brown asbestos, by which point government grant money had already been committed and spent. The school was built to a capacity later admitted, in the Council’s own 2012 committee papers, to fall 21.6% short of local need — a shortfall officers had privately discussed as early as March 2006, while publicly defending the smaller figure. Warnings about inadequate drop-off arrangements from the Council’s own highways officer arrived three days before the decision that approved the scheme. The author’s questions about all of this were repeatedly ruled vexatious and blocked from council meetings between 2012 and 2013 alone on at least four separate occasions. Padden Brook (Book Two) A protected woodland in Romiley, cleared tree by tree over more than two years through a sequence of individually modest tree-works and outline planning applications, several submitted for three dwellings or fewer — comfortably under the threshold that would trigger mandatory affordable housing provision or committee-level scrutiny. The land’s protected status was denied by the Council, then admitted piecemeal, only under sustained pressure, until three separate protective designations were eventually acknowledged. Correspondence on the subject is now formally restricted, as set out in Chapter One. Offerton Precinct (Book Five) A shopping precinct owned since the 1990s by Tenbest Limited, part of a complex web of interlinked companies, allowed to fall into serious, documented disrepair while the Council pursued redevelopment negotiations for years without resolution. A Freedom of Information response in 2012 told the author the Council had no plans to purchase the site — a response the author later discovered was issued at almost exactly the time a General Vesting Declaration, the compulsory purchase mechanism, had already been signed, on 14 January 2012. A covenant on part of the site, discovered only through the CPO documents, prohibited housing outright — undermining a separate scheme the Council had allowed local traders to spend years and thousands of pounds pursuing before refusing it. Sandringham Road (Book Four)
12 A 2012 application to build housing on a former garage site prone to serious flooding, handled by planning officer Dominic Harvey. Six promised car parking spaces for an adjoining playing field, shown on the architects’ own drawings from March 2012 onward, turned out never to have formed part of what the area committee actually approved in August that year — confirmed only via a subsequent Freedom of Information response. An ambulance reportedly struggled to reach a seriously ill resident using the site’s access track days after the council’s own area committee had refused a site visit. The A555 / SEMMMS Bypass (Book Three) A road scheme whose publicly stated cost rose from an original figure of roughly £170 million to as much as £1 billion at one stage, before settling at a current £350 million, with the Council unable to produce a single document tracking why the cost changed, despite what the author argues is a legal duty to be able to do so. The road has flooded in some form in nearly every year since it opened in October 2018, including a closure lasting more than a week into 2025; an independent investigation attributed at least part of the problem to drainage components installed hundreds of millimetres higher than their own design specified. Questions about the scheme’s costs and consultants were, in parallel with Harcourt Street questions being asked in the same period, separately ruled vexatious or “potentially defamatory” and blocked from council meetings in January, February, April and June of 2013. The Michael Parnell Case A long-running case, documented in a separate book in this series, concerning the Council’s treatment of a named individual — known locally as the Stockport Town Hall protestor — including pursuit for £24 of alleged council tax arrears while he was in intensive care, despite his being an officially designated vulnerable council taxpayer whose circumstances had not changed. Mr Parnell died before his story could be told in his own words; he entrusted his documents to the author before his death. The Marple Active Communities Hub (Book Six, in progress) The most recent case taken up in this series concerns a £20 million Levelling Up Fund-backed community hub in Marple and the rapid rise of the councillor now responsible for it to a Cabinet role, with questions raised about how the funding criteria were met and how the appointment came about. Vicki Bates appears again in this account, named by the author as a recurring figure in the same context as the Council Leader she alleges verbally confronted her in Romiley Precinct in 2025.
13 Chapter Three: The Website Is Down When You Need It Most If “vexatious” is the Council’s answer when a question is asked too often, unreliable public information systems are its answer when a question is asked in the ordinary way, through the ordinary channels the Council itself provides. This chapter sets out a pattern of the Council’s own digital infrastructure failing, repeatedly, at the exact moments residents and journalists have tried to use it to check what the Council has actually decided. “Document Unavailable” The clearest single example concerns planning application DC/044143 (also recorded as DC044143), relating to Offerton Precinct — a renewal of an earlier outline permission for demolition and regeneration of the site, granted with a decision issued on 24 January 2011. The only document listed against this application on the Council’s own planning portal is its Decision Notice. That document, when accessed, returns “Document Unavailable.” The portal’s public summary for the same application lists the case officer as “Not Available” — meaning there is, on the Council’s own public record, no way to establish who made this decision or to retrieve the notice that supposedly confirms it. A Live Example, Caught in the Act While researching this book, the author encountered the same pattern in real time. On 22 September 2026, Stockport Council’s own “Find planning applications” page displayed a standing red banner reading: “Issues with the mapping system. We’re experiencing some issues with the mapping system in public access. We’re working with our software provider to resolve this as quickly as we can.” This followed an earlier occasion, also documented in this research, when the Council’s planning-applications search page returned a bare “Server Problem” error page rather than any results at all. These are not isolated technical hiccups. Taken together with the DC/044143 case above, and with a separate finding during this research that even the Council’s official application-detail pages — reached via their own internally generated reference links — could not be loaded at all on the day they were tried, a picture emerges of a public information system that fails often enough, and at moments significant enough, to function as a further obstacle to scrutiny, whatever its cause. The same “mapping system” error was still displayed, unchanged, when checked again on 24 September 2026 — a screenshot from that date, timestamped in the taskbar, is reproduced at Appendix C alongside the earlier capture, so the reader can see this is not a passing fault but a fault the Council has lived with for weeks. The Officer Whose Category Doesn’t Match His Application A further, smaller irregularity surfaced during this research and is recorded here because it illustrates how easily an ordinary administrative record can go unexamined when the systems built to hold it to account are themselves unreliable. Two applications submitted on the same date, for the same site, by the same case officer and the same agent — both describing, in near-identical
14 wording, retrospective permission for external playground equipment at a public house on Didsbury Road — are recorded under two different application types. One, DC/099344, is filed as a straightforward Full Application. The other, DC/099421, is filed as Demolition in a Conservation Area: a different, separately regulated category with its own statutory tests, which nothing in the application’s own description mentions. Whether this is a simple data-entry error or reflects works not captured in the public description is, at the time of writing, an open question the author has put to the Council directly. Why This Matters Beyond Convenience A council’s public planning register is not a courtesy. It is the mechanism by which the law expects residents, objectors and journalists to hold planning decisions to account — to check who decided what, when, and on what evidence. When that register is unreliable — when decision notices return “Document Unavailable,” when case officers are recorded as “Not Available,” when the search tool itself is down on the day someone tries to use it — the practical effect, whatever the intent, is the same as if the question itself had been ruled vexatious: the person asking is left with nothing.
15 Chapter Four: What the Pattern Adds Up To No single chapter of this book proves wrongdoing in any one case. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to show what becomes visible only when the cases are placed side by side: that a resident asking sustained, detailed questions about a primary school built on a toxic tip; a woodland being felled tree by tree; a shopping precinct left to rot; a flooding garage site; a half-billion-pound road that floods on schedule; the treatment of a named, now-deceased individual; and a rapidly awarded £20 million grant — has, in every single case, eventually run into the same three obstacles. A label. A diverted inbox. A system that does not work on the day it is needed. The author’s own conclusion, offered here as analysis rather than as an established finding, is that this is not the accumulation of seven unrelated administrative failures, but a single, recognisable institutional response to sustained scrutiny — one that has so far proved more durable than any of the underlying decisions it has been used to shield. The individual cases in this series will each be judged on their own facts, by the Ombudsman, by the Information Commissioner, and in time by the reader. What this book asks is a narrower, and in some ways a harder, question: not whether any one decision was right or wrong, but whether an organisation that responds to persistent, reasonable questions in the same way, across entirely unconnected subjects, over a period of more than a decade, can fairly go on describing that pattern as coincidence. This book will continue to grow as the Padden Brook Ombudsman complaint, the Marple Hub investigation, and the outstanding Freedom of Information requests referenced in Chapter Three are answered — or, as has so often been the pattern recorded here, are not.
16 Appendix A: The Padden Brook Restriction Letter (24 August 2026) Reproduced in full. Sent by Vicki Bates, Chief Governance Officer and Monitoring Officer, Corporate and Support Services, Stockport Council. Dear Mrs Oliver As you know all your FOIs and EIRs relating to any matters concerning Padden Brook have previously been deemed vexatious and will not be responded to or acknowledged. The reasons for this have been set out to you previously. I write to confirm that all other communications that you send via email, letter, by way of a question to a committee meeting or via any other means of correspondence or communication (including complaints) to the council relating to Padden Brook or surrounding area will now be treated as unreasonably persistent pursuant to the council’s Unacceptable Actions by Complainants Policy. This is due to the number of emails (hundreds) you have sent to the council containing the same or similar questions over the last 2 years relating to Padden Brook. For example, I note that once again you refer to the land as being “protected” despite the correct position being set out to you on a number of occasions. Your communications on this subject are unreasonable as they significantly impact the council’s work, taking up excessive time to the detriment of other services of the council. In addition, you have sent a significant amount of emails to the council which contain abusive and defamatory content, which you have also publicly shared. These often relate to the council’s planning officers and department, to which your complaint relates. I will share these with the ombudsman in the event you escalate your complaint to them. I also reserve the council’s rights in relation to any legal action it may wish to take against you in relation to your conduct referred above. Please find attached a copy of the policy and a link to the policy on the website :- Make a formal complaint – Stockport Council All your emails will be diverted to a specific inbox and will only be read once per week by either myself or one of the council’s deputy monitoring officers. I will review this restriction on your communications to the council in six months time. I have considered the impact of this restriction on your communications pursuant to the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010 and do not consider there to be any. Yours sincerely Vicki Bates (She/Her) Chief Governance Officer and Monitoring Officer, Corporate and Support Services, Stockport Council
17 Appendix B: The Original Complaint (21 August 2026) Reproduced in full. Sent by the author to Katie Moores, Lisa McGrane, Michael Cullen, the Leader, and Planning.DC, three days before Appendix A was sent in reply. Dear Sir/Madam, Formal complaint – Padden Brook planning enforcement and unreasonable delay I am writing to make a formal complaint about the handling of the planning enforcement matter concerning Padden Brook. This matter has now been ongoing for more than two years, yet I remain concerned that there has been no effective resolution or meaningful enforcement action. In particular, I am concerned about the apparent lack of progress by the enforcement officer despite the circumstances at the site continuing to develop. The issues I understand to have been brought to the Council’s attention include: the dumping of a derelict butty van on the land; the subsequent transformation of that vehicle into what now appears to be a site office; the dumping/placement of a table and chairs on the land; the fact that the land is protected land; and the continuing use and occupation of the site despite the passage of more than two years since the enforcement concerns were raised. I appreciate that the Council has discretion as to whether formal planning enforcement action is appropriate. My complaint, however, is not simply that I disagree with a particular planning decision. It is principally about the length of time this matter has remained unresolved, the apparent lack of effective investigation and the failure to provide a clear explanation of what action the Council has taken and why. I would therefore ask the Council to treat this as a formal complaint and provide a clear response addressing the following: what investigations have been undertaken; what enforcement investigations or decisions have been recorded, and on what dates; what is the current status of the enforcement case; whether the change from a derelict butty van to its current use as a site office has been assessed as a potentially separate or materially changed planning matter; whether the placement and use of the table and chairs has been investigated; whether the Council has specifically considered the protected status of the land when assessing the alleged breaches; and, if enforcement action is not appropriate, the reasons and relevant planning considerations for that conclusion — or, if no final decision has yet been made, why the matter has remained unresolved for more than two years. I am particularly concerned about the apparent length of the delay. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has previously found fault with Stockport Council in relation to delay in a planning enforcement investigation. I therefore expect the Council to address the issue of unreasonable delay specifically rather than simply restating the general position regarding planning enforcement discretion.
18 I would also ask that this complaint is considered independently of the officer whose handling of the matter is the subject of the complaint, in accordance with the Council’s complaints procedure. Please confirm that this has been registered as a formal Stage 1 complaint and provide me with the relevant complaint reference number. Yours faithfully, Sheila Oliver, Editor, The Romiley Gazette
19 Appendix C: The Mapping System, Caught Failing Twice Stockport Council’s own “Find planning applications” page, stockport.gov.uk/find-planning- applications, screenshot taken 24 September 2026 — date visible in the taskbar clock.
The same standing red “Issues with the mapping system” banner referenced in Chapter Three, still displayed more than two
weeks after it first appeared — confirming this is an ongoing failure, not a one-off.
20 Appendix D: The Ombudsman’s Decision (21 September 2026) Reproduced in full. Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, ref 25 017 921. The Ombudsman’s own practice is to anonymise complainants as “Mrs X” in published decisions; that anonymisation is preserved here as it appears in the original. 21 September 2026 Complaint reference: 25 017 921 Complaint against: Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council Dear Mrs Oliver Complaint about Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council As you know, the Ombudsman asked me to decide if we can and should investigate your complaint. You will see from the attached final decision statement that I have decided we will not consider your complaint further. I recognise this may disappoint you but thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention. By law, we must tell the Council of our decision, so I have sent it a copy. We publish our final decision statements on our website. We use false names and do not reveal details that could identify people involved. The Ombudsman’s final decision Summary: We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s response to complaints Mrs X has raised about a local site. This is because the complaint is late and there is no good reason to exercise discretion to investigate. We will also not investigate the Council’s decision to restrict Mrs X’s communication with it. This is because an investigation would be unlikely to find fault with the Council’s actions. The complaint
Mrs X complained the Council has failed to properly investigate or take enforcement action regarding concerns she has raised about a local site. She also complained the Council has restricted her communication with it. The Ombudsman’s role and powers
The Local Government Act 1974 sets out our powers but also imposes restrictions on what we can investigate.
We cannot investigate late complaints unless we decide there are good reasons. Late complaints are when someone takes more than 12 months to complain to us about something a council has done. (Local Government Act 1974, sections 26B and 34D, as amended)
21
We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully. We do not start or continue an investigation if we decide there is not enough evidence of fault to justify investigating, or any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), section 34(B)) How I considered this complaint
I considered information provided by Mrs X and the Council.
I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code. My assessment
Mrs X has been complaining to the Council regarding activities taking place at a local site for several years. She has also complained that the Council has deemed her a vexatious complainant and restricted her communication with it.
The Council has responded to Mrs X with details of the site visits it carried out and the laws which govern the site, confirming it has not found evidence further action is necessary. It has informed Mrs X that some of the matters she has raised are criminal matters and should be referred to the police.
The Council has confirmed it considers Mrs X’s communication with it on these matters to be excessive. It has therefore restricted her ability to communicate with it and has assigned her a single point of contact in line with its vexatious complainant’s policy. It reviewed this recently and upheld the decision.
Mrs X wants us to find the Council at fault. The Ombudsman will not exercise discretion to investigate matters that took place more than 12 months before the complainant came to us unless there are good reasons for the delay. Given the issues complained about have been ongoing for over 2 years it would have been reasonable for Mrs X to complain to us much sooner. There is no evidence these matters have caused Mrs X an ongoing significant personal injustice. There is therefore no good reason to exercise discretion to investigate.
With regards to the Council’s decision to restrict Mrs X’s contact; the evidence shows the Council has provided Mrs X with reasons for its decision and has carried out an annual review of the decision in line with its policy. An investigation into this part of the complaint would be unlikely to result in finding fault with the Council’s actions. Final decision
We will not investigate Mrs X’s complaint because parts of the complaint are late and there is no good reason to exercise discretion to investigate. An investigation into the remaining parts would be unlikely to find fault with the Council’s actions. Investigator’s decision on behalf of the Ombudsman
Complaint about Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council: a sustained pattern of disproportionate and procedurally improper use of “vexatious” and “unreasonable actions” designations against a resident spanning more than a decade and multiple unrelated matters
I am writing to make a formal complaint about Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council (“the Council”). This complaint concerns the Council’s own conduct and administrative practice — specifically, its repeated, longstanding, and in my view disproportionate use of “vexatious” (under FOIA/EIR) and “unreasonable actions” designations against me, across multiple, factually unconnected matters, over a period of more than a decade.
I want to be clear at the outset about what I am, and am not, asking the Ombudsman to do, because I understand jurisdictional boundaries matter to how this complaint should be handled.
What I am not asking
I am not asking the Ombudsman to overturn any specific decision made by the Information Commissioner’s Office, or any specific “vexatious” finding made by the Council under section 14(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or regulation 12(4)(b) of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004. I understand that individual FOIA/EIR refusals have their own statutory route of challenge (internal review, then complaint to the ICO, then appeal to the First-tier Tribunal (Information Rights)), and I have pursued that route separately where appropriate.
What I am asking
I am asking the Ombudsman to investigate the Council’s own administrative conduct: specifically, whether the Council has repeatedly applied “vexatious”/”unreasonable actions” labels to me in a way that is disproportionate, inconsistent with its own published policy, and not properly evidenced on a case-by-case basis, and whether this amounts to maladministration causing me a significant and continuing injustice. This is a complaint about process and conduct, not about the merits of any single FOIA/EIR decision.
Summary of the pattern
Over more than fifteen years, I have raised concerns with the Council about several entirely separate matters: land contamination and school safety at the former Harcourt Street site (Vale View Primary School, North Reddish); the Council’s treatment of the late Michael Parnell; and, most recently, planning enforcement and protected woodland at Padden Brook, Romiley. In each case, my questions, FOI/EIR requests, and formal complaints have at various points been labelled “vexatious” or treated as “unreasonably persistent,” resulting in restrictions on how and whether I could communicate with the Council. In several instances, matters I raised and was told were vexatious, unfounded, or not the Council’s responsibility were later shown to be correct — including undersizing of Vale View Primary School (later admitted in a Council report), road safety dangers at the same site (later the subject of police intervention and remedial works), and land protections at Padden Brook (which the Council initially denied existed at all, before admitting the land carries three separate protected designations).
I set out the two clearest documented threads below. I have substantially more material, including correspondence, FOI/EIR decision notices, ICO case references and Council policy documents, which I can provide in full.
Thread one: Harcourt Street / Vale View Primary School (2012–2019)
13 November 2012: a letter from the Council (Jonathan Vali, cc Steve Houston) confirmed the Council Leader personally decided a question I had submitted about Vale View was “vexatious” and blocked it from that month’s Executive meeting.
21 June 2012 and 20 December 2012: further letters confirm additional questions were separately ruled vexatious by the Council Solicitor and not put to committee.
13 June 2013: a further question, about sports facilities/fields at Harcourt Street, was ruled vexatious by the Chair and not put to the Executive Meeting.
13 July 2012: on the same day the Council Solicitor again called my questions “vexatious,” a comparable site elsewhere had to be evacuated for landfill gas — the same category of risk I had been raising about Harcourt Street for approximately six years.
I subsequently learned that at least one of the officers involved in labelling my Harcourt Street/Vale View concerns “vexatious” (as far back as 2019) has since gone on to apply the same designation to my separate and unconnected Padden Brook correspondence.
I complained to the Local Government Ombudsman previously about this matter; the caseworker (Chris Upjohn) found nothing wrong. I respectfully consider that this earlier LGO review did not have before it the fuller pattern now evidenced, spanning a second, unrelated site more than a decade later.
Thread two: Padden Brook (2024–2026)
A formal complaint I submitted to the Council on 21 August 2026 about prolonged delay in planning enforcement at Padden Brook (raised initially more than two years earlier) received a reply from Vicki Bates, Chief Governance Officer and Monitoring Officer, on 24 August 2026, confirming that all my FOI/EIR requests concerning Padden Brook are treated as vexatious and will not even be acknowledged, and that all other correspondence on the subject will be treated as “unreasonably persistent” under the Council’s own Unacceptable Actions by Complainants Policy (April 2026), with my emails diverted to an inbox read only periodically.
The Council’s own April 2026 policy states that such restrictions should be a “last resort,” and must be tailored and proportionate rather than blanket (I understand this to be reflected in sections 2.2, 3.6, 9.1, 9.4, 10.1, 10.2 and 14 of that policy). I do not consider the restriction imposed on me meets that standard: it is a blanket restriction covering an entire subject area rather than a tailored response to specific conduct, and it was imposed alongside a refusal to specify which of my communications were said to be “abusive and defamatory.”
An internal review of an earlier Padden Brook EIR request (ref IR 101007866729, on request ref EIR 101007834786), completed 1 July 2025 by the Council’s Information Governance Manager, upheld a vexatious refusal citing approximately 230 emails sent since August 2024. I do not accept that volume of correspondence alone, on a matter of ongoing and unresolved concern which the Council itself took months to answer even once, establishes vexatiousness — nor does it, in my submission, justify extending that designation to every future communication on the subject without individual assessment.
The Council’s own correspondence (an 8 October 2024 email prepared by the then Chief Planning Officer) subsequently admitted that the Padden Brook woodland is a Local Wildlife Site under the local plan, and that a 1974 planning refusal on the same land had already identified it as protected amenity land — directly contradicting the Council’s earlier position, given to me, that the land had no protection at all.
Separately, I am the Editor of a local newspaper (the Romiley Gazette). A number of the communications counted against me by the Council as “unreasonably persistent” were, in substance, standard pre-publication requests for comment sent to the Council before running a story — ordinary journalistic practice, not a personal grievance campaign.
Why I consider this maladministration causing injustice
The Council has applied the same serious label — vexatious / unreasonably persistent — to me across at least three unconnected subject areas, over more than a decade, including via officers who moved between cases. I consider this indicates an institutional practice of using the label to manage a persistent critic, rather than a genuine, individualised assessment of each request’s merits, as the Council’s own policy requires.
In multiple instances, the substance of what I was raising was later shown to be correct (school undersizing, road safety risk, and the existence of protected land status at Padden Brook), which I submit is directly relevant to whether the underlying communications were genuinely vexatious or were, in fact, legitimate and ultimately vindicated scrutiny.
The restrictions imposed have a serious practical effect: my correspondence is diverted to an inbox read only periodically, meaning urgent matters (including, at Padden Brook, an active risk to a retaining wall supporting a road serving some twenty-four homes) may not receive timely attention.
As a working citizen journalist, being formally branded vexatious by the local authority I report on is professionally damaging in a way that goes beyond the inconvenience to an ordinary resident.
What I am asking the Ombudsman to do
Investigate whether the Council’s use of “vexatious”/”unreasonable actions” designations against me, considered as a pattern across the Harcourt Street and Padden Brook matters (and any other instances the Council’s own records may show), amounts to maladministration.
Consider whether the Council has complied with its own Unacceptable Actions by Complainants Policy (April 2026), in particular its requirements that restrictions be a last resort, tailored, proportionate, and individually assessed rather than applied blanket to an entire subject area.
If maladministration is found, recommend an appropriate remedy. I would ask that any recommended remedy specifically include the Council writing to the Information Commissioner’s Office to correct the record as to the history of my requests being treated as vexatious, and lifting or substantially narrowing the current communications restriction so that individual future requests are assessed on their own merits.
I recognise the Ombudsman cannot itself direct the ICO’s own assessment of any live or future FOIA/EIR request. My request is that the Council be required to communicate accurately with the ICO about the Council’s own conduct, as a remedy for the Council’s maladministration — not that the Ombudsman substitute its judgment for the ICO’s on any FOIA/EIR matter.
Steps already taken
I have raised each underlying matter with the Council directly and, where relevant, sought internal review of FOI/EIR refusals.
I submitted a separate complaint to the Ombudsman on 24 August 2026 specifically about the Padden Brook planning enforcement delay and the communications restriction; I would ask that this new, wider complaint be read alongside that one, or that the two be considered together, as they concern the same underlying pattern of conduct.
I have separately raised the Padden Brook EIR handling with the Information Commissioner’s Office.
I have written previously, on more than one occasion, directly to the Information Commissioner about the pattern of vexatious designations, without a substantive reply.
Enclosures available on request
13 November 2012, 21 June 2012, 20 December 2012 and 13 June 2013 Council letters confirming Harcourt Street questions ruled vexatious
21 August 2026 Stage 1 complaint to the Council re Padden Brook, and Vicki Bates’ reply of 24 August 2026
The Council’s Unacceptable Actions by Complainants Policy (April 2026)
1 July 2025 internal review decision (ref IR 101007866729) upholding a vexatious EIR refusal
8 October 2024 Council email admitting Padden Brook’s protected status
Correspondence with the Information Commissioner
I am happy to provide any of the above in full, along with further supporting documentation, on request. Given the volume of material I hold across both matters, I would welcome the opportunity to discuss with a caseworker how best to present it for the investigation.
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.
Many problems ran through Stockport Council’s new North Reddish primary school from the start — and a further issue concerning public open space ran alongside them.
The building was deliberately sized too small. In March 2006 officers ordered that it must be limited to 525 places even though projections showed 555–563 children would need places. Temporary classrooms were the planned solution. Birth rates in the area were rising.
The cost nearly doubled before the full contamination story was told. Early estimates of £5.5 million had become £9.94 million by the time the Executive approved the Compulsory Purchase Order in March 2008. Internal notes had already flagged “obvious concern over funding” the previous year, and a November 2007 risk register rated the chance of Environment Agency drainage works exceeding the £200,000 provisional sum as high.
The site was a former industrial tip. Elevated arsenic, lead and asbestos were later confirmed. The chosen clean-up was a clean soil cover system (minimum 400 mm) across play areas, localised asbestos removal, and gas membranes in the buildings.
The access arrangements created predictable traffic danger. Residents warned early that many homes would have to leave via narrow Mill Lane past the school entrance. After the school opened, Council officers recorded serious traffic-management problems and Reddish Police contacted the authority to express safety concerns.
Finally, the large public open space that had existed on the field was largely replaced. A 1982 Section 52 Agreement had required seven acres to be set aside for public recreation. In April 2009 the Executive Member for Children & Young People stated that none of that protected land was included in the school CPO. The finished school provided a fenced pitch with managed public access and playgrounds that satisfied minimum Sport England requirements, but the previous unrestricted public playing field was lost and overall open space on the site was substantially reduced.
The school eventually opened, but only after years of delay, a sharply higher bill, a constrained capacity, a cover-system remediation of contaminated ground, post-opening safety measures on the surrounding roads, and the conversion of a large public open space into school grounds. The contemporary documents — internal emails, Project Board minutes, FOI replies, verification reports, the 2009 open-space letter and the post-opening traffic report — show that each of these difficulties was visible, in whole or in part, well before the final decisions were locked in.
Stockport’s governance framework gives the Monitoring Officer a particularly important role.
The Council’s Code of Governance identifies the Monitoring Officer Protocol (CP14) as one of the constitutional arrangements supporting the Council’s commitment to integrity, ethical values and respect for the rule of law.
The Council’s governance documentation states that the Monitoring Officer is responsible for ensuring that agreed procedures are followed and that applicable statutes and regulations are complied with.
It also says that the Monitoring Officer provides advice on matters including the scope of the Council’s powers, decision-making and maladministration.
That is an important responsibility.
The Monitoring Officer is therefore not simply another officer dealing with difficult correspondence. The role exists partly to provide governance oversight and to help ensure that the Council itself follows the law, its Constitution and its agreed procedures.
What exactly was counted?
This is where the Padden Brook correspondence needs to be examined carefully.
There is a difference between:
1. a journalist asking a Council whether it wishes to respond to an article;
2. a person submitting a Freedom of Information or Environmental Information Regulations request;
3. a complainant repeatedly asking the Council to change a decision; and
4. correspondence containing abusive, threatening or otherwise unreasonable behaviour.
Those categories may overlap in some circumstances, but they are not automatically the same thing.
A newspaper editor asking:
“Does the Council wish to comment on the allegations in this article?”
is not necessarily pursuing the same objective as someone who has already received a substantive answer and continues demanding a different decision.
The purpose and context of the communication matter.
The Council’s own standards
Stockport’s governance framework says the Council seeks to conduct its business in a timely, inclusive, open, honest and accountable manner. Its Code also identifies the need for effective governance arrangements and regular review of those arrangements.
The Council’s complaints information similarly says that a complaint can include dissatisfaction with the service received, an unreasonable delay or the way someone has been treated by a member of staff. It also expressly distinguishes complaints from Freedom of Information requests.
That distinction is important.
If FOI requests, journalistic enquiries and complaints are being assessed together when deciding whether someone’s communications are “persistent”, the public is entitled to ask how that assessment was made.
A blanket restriction?
The issue becomes more significant if the Council has imposed a restriction relating to communications about Padden Brook as a subject, rather than simply limiting a particular form of unreasonable behaviour.
The question is not whether Council staff should have to tolerate abusive or threatening behaviour. They should not.
Stockport itself makes clear that it expects respectful communications and has a zero-tolerance approach to abuse, violence, bullying and harassment.
But there is a crucial difference between abuse and persistence.
A person can be persistent without being abusive.
An editor can ask a question more than once without being unreasonable.
And a new FOI request can concern a subject that has previously generated correspondence without necessarily being a repetition of an earlier request.
The relevant question should therefore be:
What exactly did the Council consider unreasonable, and why?
The right to challenge the Council
There is another principle at stake.
Public authorities are expected to be accountable.
If a Council decision is questioned, the answer cannot simply be that the person asking the questions has asked too many times.
The Council must still be able to explain:
what decision was made;
who made it;
what information was considered;
what procedure was followed;
what legal or policy framework was applied; and
how a person can properly challenge the decision.
That is particularly important where the underlying matter remains unresolved.
In Padden Brook, questions remain concerning planning enforcement, the use of the land and other matters which the Gazette has reported.
If those questions remain unanswered, further correspondence is hardly surprising.
The Monitoring Officer’s responsibility
This is why the role of the Monitoring Officer deserves scrutiny—not because there is evidence at this stage that the officer has acted improperly, but because the Monitoring Officer is specifically part of the Council’s governance system.
The Council’s own documents say the Monitoring Officer has responsibility for ensuring that agreed procedures are followed and that applicable laws and regulations are complied with.
So there are some straightforward questions which the Council should be able to answer.
When the decision was made to classify communications concerning Padden Brook as persistent or unreasonable:
What policy was applied?
What version of that policy was in force?
Was the Monitoring Officer involved?
Who made the final decision?
Was the decision reviewed?
Was proportionality considered?
Were journalistic enquiries considered separately from FOI/EIR requests?
Were requests for the Council’s right of reply to Gazette articles counted as evidence of persistence?
If so, why?
Was any distinction made between correspondence seeking information and correspondence seeking a response for publication?
What mechanism exists for reviewing the restriction?
These are not unreasonable questions.
They are questions about the Council’s own governance process.
The danger of counting the questions rather than answering them
There is a broader issue here.
A public authority receives many enquiries because people want answers.
If unanswered questions generate further emails, and those further emails are then used as evidence that the person asking the questions is “persistent”, there is an obvious danger of creating a circular process:
Question → inadequate or incomplete answer → follow-up question → follow-up counted as persistence → restriction imposed → fewer opportunities to ask questions.
That is not necessarily what has happened at Padden Brook.
But it is a risk which a properly functioning governance system should recognise.
The test should surely be whether the communications are genuinely unreasonable, rather than simply whether there are a lot of them.
What does this have to do with Padden Brook?
Everything.
The original questions about Padden Brook have not gone away.
There are still questions about what the Council investigated, what decisions it made and why.
Those are legitimate matters of public interest.
The Gazette’s role is to report them and to give the Council an opportunity to respond.
The Gazette will continue to offer the Council a right of reply
As Editor, I will continue to offer Stockport Council an opportunity to respond to articles concerning Padden Brook.
That is not intended to harass Council officers.
It is intended to ensure that readers hear the Council’s position as well as the questions being raised.
If the Council believes that something in a proposed article is wrong, it has an opportunity to say so.
If it believes that the Gazette has misunderstood a decision, it can explain the decision.
If it has evidence which answers the questions being raised, it can provide that evidence.
That is how accountable journalism should work.
The question for Stockport
The question is therefore not:
“Why won’t the Council put up with repeated emails?”
It is:
“How does Stockport Council distinguish legitimate scrutiny, journalism and requests for information from genuinely unreasonable or persistent behaviour?”
And, more importantly:
“Did the Council’s Monitoring Officer ensure that the relevant procedures, policies and governance safeguards were properly applied when that distinction was made?”
Those questions deserve answers.
Not because the Gazette expects to get its way.
Not because every allegation about Padden Brook must be accepted.
But because Stockport Council itself says that good governance means acting lawfully, openly, honestly and accountably—and ensuring that its agreed procedures are followed.
The public should be entitled to expect those standards to apply not only when the Council makes decisions, but also when citizens and journalists ask questions about those decisions.
The Gazette has asked Stockport Council for its response.
If the Council wishes to correct, clarify or add to anything in this article, the Romiley Gazette will publish its response.
For more than two years, questions surrounding Padden Brook have continued to generate correspondence between local residents and Stockport Council.
The issues are not confined to a disagreement over a planning decision. They include questions about planning enforcement, protected woodland, activity on the site, the condition of a retaining wall and, increasingly, how the Council itself has handled the concerns being raised.
Now there is a wider question to consider:
Has Stockport Council followed its own standards of good governance in dealing with Padden Brook?
That is not a claim that the Council has acted unlawfully. Nor is it a claim that every concern raised by residents must result in enforcement action.
It is a question about whether the Council has followed the procedures, standards and principles that it says govern the way it conducts its business.
What does Stockport say good governance means?
Stockport Council’s own governance documentation says that governance is about ensuring that the Council does the right things, in the right way, for the right people, in a timely, inclusive, open, honest and accountable manner.
The Council says its governance framework is intended to ensure that it:
operates in a lawful, open, inclusive and honest manner;
safeguards public money;
manages risk effectively; and
continually improves the way it operates.
The Council also says that it must be able to demonstrate that it has effective governance arrangements and that these arrangements are reviewed each year through its Annual Governance Statement.
Those are not standards imposed on Stockport by the Romiley Gazette.
They are the Council’s own standards.
That makes them relevant when examining what has happened at Padden Brook.
A planning enforcement matter that has remained unresolved
The Padden Brook concerns raised with the Council have included the dumping of a derelict butty van, its subsequent apparent use as a site office, the placement of a table and chairs, the use and occupation of the site and questions concerning the protected status of the land.
There have also been concerns about works affecting the stability of the land and a retaining wall.
The Council has discretion over whether formal planning enforcement action is appropriate. That discretion is not being challenged here.
The question is different:
What investigation has actually taken place, what decisions have been made, and why has it taken so long to reach a clear conclusion?
A formal complaint submitted to the Council in August 2026 asked precisely those questions, including what investigations had been undertaken, what enforcement decisions had been recorded, the current status of the case and why the matter had remained unresolved for more than two years.
Those are reasonable questions for a public authority to answer.
Indeed, if the Council has investigated the matter and decided that no enforcement action is justified, there should surely be a record of that decision and the reasons for it.
If no final decision has been made, there is an equally legitimate question about why.
The retaining wall raises a separate governance question
There is also documentary evidence concerning the retaining wall near Howard Close.
Correspondence reproduced by the Gazette states that structural engineers had examined the situation and advised that trees adjacent to the wall should be removed because their roots were undermining the wall’s footings.
The same correspondence warned that if the wall failed, the footpath and road could subside, potentially resulting in a road closure.
Again, this does not establish who is legally responsible for the wall.
But it does raise a straightforward governance question:
What did Stockport Council know about the potential risk, when did it know it, what assessment did it make, and what action followed?
Risk management is expressly part of Stockport’s governance framework.
Where there is documentary evidence referring to structural engineering concerns and the possibility of road and footpath subsidence, it is reasonable to expect the relevant authority to be able to explain how that risk was considered.
The Annual Governance Statement
This is where the issue becomes more interesting.
Stockport’s Annual Governance Statement explains that the Council reviews the effectiveness of its governance arrangements each year, identifies significant governance issues and considers how previous issues have been addressed.
The 2023/24 statement also records a moderate assurance opinion from the Head of Internal Audit.
That opinion said there was generally a sound system of internal control, but also identified weaknesses in the design and inconsistent application of controls which put particular objectives at risk.
There is no suggestion that this finding specifically concerns Padden Brook.
It does, however, provide an important context.
If Stockport’s own internal audit process recognises that inconsistent application of controls can create risk, then it is legitimate to ask whether the Council’s procedures were consistently applied in this particular case.
Then there is the question of “persistent” correspondence
This is perhaps the most contentious part of the story.
As Editor of the Romiley Gazette, I have repeatedly contacted Stockport Council about Padden Brook.
But there is an important reason for doing so.
Before publishing articles about the Council, I have asked the Council whether it wishes to respond.
That is normal journalistic practice.
It is not an attempt to prevent criticism. Quite the opposite: it gives the authority an opportunity to put its position on the public record.
Where the Council has not answered a question, further correspondence has sometimes been necessary to obtain clarification or to ask whether the Council wishes to respond to a forthcoming article.
Those contacts have subsequently been included within the Council’s assessment of the volume of correspondence and have counted towards the characterisation of my communications as persistent.
That raises an obvious question:
Should a journalist’s attempts to obtain a response from a public authority before publishing criticism be treated in the same way as repetitive correspondence from a complainant who has already received a substantive answer?
There is a legitimate distinction between the two.
The Council’s own April 2026 policy on unreasonable actions by complainants says that complaints should be considered on their merits and that unreasonable actions do not necessarily mean that the underlying issue is invalid.
It also says restrictions should generally be a last resort, must be tailored and proportionate, and that the Council should not adopt a blanket approach to restricting contact.
That policy therefore creates a further question about Padden Brook.
The Council has stated that communications concerning Padden Brook and the surrounding area will be treated as unreasonably persistent, with emails diverted to a particular inbox and read only periodically by the Monitoring Officer or a deputy.
Is that restriction tailored to genuinely unreasonable behaviour, or does it amount to the sort of blanket restriction the Council’s own policy says it should avoid?
That is something the Council should explain.
Persistence is not necessarily unreasonable
There is another point which should not be overlooked.
If a resident writes to a Council and receives no answer, it is entirely foreseeable that they will write again.
If the second email receives no substantive answer, another follow-up is equally foreseeable.
At what point does persistence become unreasonable?
The answer cannot simply be the number of emails.
The context matters.
Was the original question answered?
Was the response complete?
Was new information supplied?
Was clarification requested?
Was a new complaint being made?
Was the communication genuinely abusive?
Or was someone simply trying to obtain an answer from a public authority?
These distinctions matter.
They matter even more when the underlying issue remains unresolved.
Freedom of Information requests
There is a similar issue concerning FOI and Environmental Information Regulations requests.
The Council has stated that previous requests concerning Padden Brook have been treated as vexatious.
That does not necessarily mean that every future request on the same subject can automatically be treated in the same way.
Each request needs to be considered on its own circumstances.
The Gazette therefore believes that, if the Council relies upon previous vexatious-request decisions, it should be possible to identify the requests concerned, the information sought and the reasons for the decisions.
That would allow the public to distinguish between genuinely repetitive requests and attempts to obtain information which had not previously been supplied.
This is bigger than one resident
It would be easy to portray Padden Brook as a disagreement between one resident and the Council.
The documentary material suggests a wider picture.
Other residents have raised concerns and correspondence concerning the area, while the issues include planning, woodland protection, land use, environmental matters, potential enforcement and the condition of a retaining structure.
That does not mean every concern is necessarily justified.
It does mean that the Council should be able to demonstrate that the issues have been properly considered.
What should happen now?
The Gazette is not asking Stockport Council to agree with every allegation made about Padden Brook.
Nor is it asking the Council to take enforcement action simply because residents want it.
It is asking for something much more basic:
A clear account of what the Council has investigated, what it has decided, what evidence it relied upon, what risks it identified, and why the matter has taken so long.
And there is a second question:
Has the Council applied its own governance and communications policies consistently and proportionately while dealing with those concerns?
Those questions should not be difficult for a well-governed public authority to answer.
Stockport itself says that good governance requires openness, accountability, effective risk management, lawful conduct and continuous improvement.
The Council also says that its governance arrangements must be reviewed and that it must report publicly on the extent to which it has complied with its own Code.
Padden Brook therefore provides an opportunity to test those principles against a real case.
Not through accusation.
Not through political point-scoring.
But through documents, decisions and evidence.
The Romiley Gazette has asked Stockport Council to respond
The Gazette will continue to offer Stockport Council the opportunity to respond to the matters raised in this article.
If the Council believes that any factual assertion in this article is incorrect, we will publish its response.
Here at the Romiley Gazette, we use Artificial Intelligence to help with things like researching, writing, and formatting articles. It’s a handy tool that helps us get stories out faster and keep things accurate — but don’t worry, everything still gets a proper human check before it reaches you!
