His legal right to counselling for his lovely young daughters who had had a terrible time with their birth parents. They were getting counselling, but despite Stockport Council having received of £600,000 to fund such services, their counselling from After Adoption was stopped.
Mr Parnell asked for a decade for help for his daughters (well this is normal for Stockport) without any response. So he decided to stand on the town hall steps, sometimes night and day, until the councillors/council officers did what they were paid large sums of money for and which he had a legal right to. They continued to simply ignore him. His lovely daughters were more and more in need of help. Sometimes young people who have had a difficult life take longer to grow up.
I objected as I didn’t know whether the footpaths would be diverted into areas of contamination. For the public inquiry to look into this, and for the public inquiry only and not for the safety of the children, they finally did the contamination investigations demanded by the Environment Agency.
The entire site was contaminated with lead, arsenic and blue asbestos.
“It is inconceivable that the school would actually be built following “failure to detect toxics” – the tests were obviously unreliable especially having failed and caused the reckless plans to go ahead. By then the financial aspects of this new project were too great to resist, especially backed by the extraordinary claim by the Council that the old industrial tip site could be made safe and used.
The Council had commissioned soil tests and found no contamination! There was the influence of the Government grant of £2.2 million already in the till and even spent on something else. But more soil tests, only carried out because the Council had to prove to a diversion of footpath public inquiry that the site was not contaminated found a variety of chemicals – lead, arsenic and brown asbestos. What on earth were the previous experts – Greater Manchester Geological Unit – doing to have missed all this or should the question be who was in the pocket of whom?
Contracters then sifted the deadly material by hand –
Come on! How could they recognise the material, especially when the experts couldn’t?
The excellent local MP Andrew Gwynne said they were spending money to save face because the site had to be used.
Councillor Mark Weldon stated the Council had “no responsible alternative”. Well I never! Responsible to whom? Certainly not the council taxpayers.
“During 2010 there were 112 pages in the six issues, including a few supplements, and contained within – excluding the ‘Your council’ pages, were 17 pictures of Dave Goddard and eight pictures of Councillor John Smith. Not too far behind was Councillor Helen Foster-Grimes………………….The special edition in the March to April issue contained the same story and pictures about getting active (and needless to say the almost obligatory picture of John Smith) as did the January to February issue.
But worst of all is the cost – a freedom of information request for the cost of the six issues published in 2010 showed the cost as £147,000 – an outrageous waste of public funds. Two a year would have meant an annual saving of £1m over ten years. What could they have done with this million pounds? This paper is just pure LibDem propaganda which is proved by the fact that it never publishes photos of a Tory Minister – onlyLibDems…. My advice would be to produce it every six months and remove all the blatant electioneering – i.e. the unnecessary photos of LibDem ministers and councillors such as John Smith with a spade (January to February issue).”
