Shed and Corruption – Part 4: Shooting the Messenger

It was true then and is still true today but what did the Council tell the Ombudsman?

1

The complainant, whom I shall refer to as Mr X, complains the Council has wrongly allowed a developer to build and keep a boat shed despite many public objections. In particular he says
i) It wrongly said the boat shed conformed with approved plans
ii) It has not taken enforcement action against the boat shed
iii) There has been a lack of information and public consultation
iv) It took 15 months for the Council to admit the boat shed did not have planning permission

Please note:

the first is absolutely correct;
– it initially took enforcement action but it was rescinded following a meeting in November 2013 where unapproved documents were passed off as approved ones;
– they sent plans that were not approved, as ones saying that they were approved on numerous occasions, then they started accusing the Residents of making allegations when they were questioned about them. Mr X was singled out and Sectioned on the word of the Council’s Corporate Lead when he complained that the Council had misled the Ombudsman .
– four: is debatable, the Council even conceded that the shed had been built without planning permission when they talking about the width.
See response to Petition, page 2.

The original complaint was removed by the Principal Planning Officer and replaced by the actions of the Planning Manager, the Head of Development Services and the Performance and Information Officer which left it open for someone to give the Ombudsman as much misinformation and to misrepresent the drawings as he or she wished:

19

We know work on the foundations started within five years of the approval. Building control inspectors confirmed it at the time. However, the developers had not met conditions 3 and 4 before starting work in 2001. The Council found the planning permission was lawfully implemented. There is no fault in either the process or reasoning by which the Council reached this decision.

the footings may have been lawful but they were wider and longer than permitted .

As soon as these foundations were used to mount the framework then the second condition would fail and it did on the 5th September 2013 and why UK Docks were told to stop work on it when the Council had recovered drawings 8296/1A, 2 and 4 from their archive by the end of the following week. Work had certainly stopped by 23rd September 2013.

20

In response to the draft of my decision Mr X says because the foundations are too wide the permission was not lawfully implemented.
This is the First indicator of collusion between the Council and the Ombudsman:Mr X did not say they were lawfully implemented the Council;
he said: That they were not laid in accordance with the authorised plans (1m too wide) was overlooked by the Council. This could have been looked at if the Council had ask(ed) for retrospective planning application.
The Council’s view the permission was lawfully implemented is sound, even if the foundations are wider than shown in the plans. I should also say we cannot know if the foundations laid by the developers in 2001 were wider than allowed in the plans.
Second indicator of collusion– they were wider than planned. Mr X went and measured them for himself in November 2013 and his results were surprisingly accurate considering he has working nearly 50m from the shed. He found them to be set a meter further apart than permitted.
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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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