Shed and Corruption – Part 4: Shooting the Messenger

It is perfectly reasonable to let one’s MP know when a Council they represent is giving misinformation to Local Government Ombudsman. It is then up the MP if she does anything about it, and if the facts of a case have been made known to other MPs or the Press it is up to them to decide whether they do anything about it and not you, nor the Chief Executive nor the Leader of the Council.
The second accusation, continuing to contact us without presenting new and relevant information, is a simple inversion of the truth. I thanked the Planning Manager on March the 3rd 2014 for conceding that the shed was nearly 3m taller than planned the approved 1996 plans give a height of the river drive end of the shed as 12.7m.

Let me explain: there were two approved plans held in the Council’s archive from 1996 and one, 8293/4, bore no dimensions and was not drawn to scale, and can therefore be discarded but the other, 8296/2 indicated quite clearly, the planned height of the shed at the landward end and it is 12.7m.

On the right hand edge there is an authorisation stamp and 8296/4 bears a similar one. Neither of the drawings presented to the Council by UK Docks in September 2013 bear one of those stamps, nor does the drawing sent to us by the Principal Planning Officer, 8296/1A. That was sent following the meeting at the Town Hall, November 2013 where it was claimed that the shed was ‘legal’ by Cllr Anglin and then ‘compliant’ by the Principal Planning Officer, Mr Cunningham. Yes – compliant with an error on a non-approved plan.

I have repeatedly said that drawing 8296/1A shows both ends of the shed to have a height of 15.5m and left it for you and everyone since Mr Cunningham first sent us the copy of 8296/1B and the doctored copy of 8296/2 in September 2013 to work that out what that meant for yourselves.

I say doctored because the critical dimensions have been removed from the left hand side and the drawing number and date of the upper drawing of the pair given to Mr Cunningham, 6-Sep-13. What the Director of UK Docks did not realise was that anyone used to working with architectural or engineering drawings would be able to spot errors and relied on Mr Cunningham to turn a blind eye to the deceit that he was making the shed taller by 2.7m. Perhaps Mr Cunningham arranged for the vital details to be cropped from what was a copy of 8296/2?

Neither the Planning Manager nor his Principal Planning Officer ever said that the footings or the shed was lawful but they did not correct anyone else for saying that saying that they and the shed was lawful to mean they had been approved. If you check the records you will find that I have never claimed that the shed was lawful. The drawing to which they referred, ../1A was not approved because it contained a mistake in the landward end. I preferred to use ../14 because there was no argument about which end of the shed to which the gable end drawing referred, and it was the river end. I should not have to explain to you that the Pilot Boats, ferries and Border Patrol Vessels enter shed from the river and not from River Drive.

When the Director of UK Docks instructed the Agents, Maughan Reynolds and Partners to produce the drawing, 8296/14, in August 2013 it appears he did not tell them that the drawings he was going to send to those making the frames, and bear in mind each one was different, that the finished structure going to be 2.7m taller than the one for which his firm had been given permission.

It appears that both the Planning Manager and his Principal Planning Officer, Messrs Atkinson and Cunningham had complete confidence in the Council’s Head of Development Services and Customer Advocacy – see Shed and Corruption Parts 1 and 2, to hide their mendacity and they could risk telling such outright lies such as: 8296/1A had been approved, 8296/14 was not drawn to scale and the drafter had not specified to which end of the shed, the gable end on it, referred.

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4 Responses to Shed and Corruption – Part 4: Shooting the Messenger

  1. Paul says:

    Micheal I have experienced a similar issues with council complaint corruption. Then abusing contact restrictions to close down and silence the victim.

    • Mick Dawson says:

      Hi Paul, thank you for your support.

    • Paul says:

      Hi Paul,
      Don’t worry, she’s what my mother would have called a nasty piece of work and I have marked your emails as spam. I get up to half a dozen a day.
      I’d forgotten to include her in the list of Cc’s so I used the opportunity of commenting on Part 8 to pass a copy of it to her.
      When she first slagged us off in 2015 she did not copy me or anyone else in and I did not find out about it for six months:
      The matters and allegations raised by your constituent are well documented and have been subject to a number of enquiries from Mr Dawson and other local residents over a lengthy period of time.
      As I do not want to be accused of hypocrisy, I like to make sure that she is aware my views.

  2. Mick Dawson says:

    The Council are operating their own Complaints Procedure corruptly. Is aking them why they persist in doing it unreasonable bevaviour?
    Defined in Section 7: Complaints Policy 2019v1.5 :
    7. Managing unacceptable and/or unreasonable behaviour South Tyneside Council is committed to providing an inclusive and accessible service for all of our customers, but we also need to ensure we provide a safe working environment for our staff.

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