The Harbour View Website was designed to collate information, plans, copies of e-mails etc. to and from the relevant parties and to reach the wider community and anyone with concerns about this development was welcome to have their say – see: Contacts Page.
It was created about the same time as the Planning Manager, while agreeing with the protestors about the shed being too tall, was telling his bosses that it was built to the approved height. He could act with duplicity because he knew that his tracks could be covered by the Ombudsman being misled.
From the time the first frames were erected, September, 2013 it became clear that the shed was too tall  2013 and the denials started straight away and they first appeared in the local press. What neither the Council nor UK Docks realized was that the gradient gave scale to any side elevation of the shed, fag packet sketches excluded of course.
The corruption began with ST/1146/13/COND which only addressed conditions 3 and 4 but ignored the second:  The development to which this permission relates shall be carried out in complete accordance with the approved plans and specifications.

The responses in pages below were ignored but by then, they had already ignored the quesion of height that was asked at the beginning of September 2013: “Could you please confirm what height the structure is being constructed to? It seems that one had approval (12mtrs), and the other didn’t (15.5mtrs).
Their problem was compounded when became clear to the protestors that some of the plans showed that the planned height was 15.5m at the waters edge and the height at that end was measured by the Council on September 17th 2013 and found to be 18.2m.

The Council was then left with the choice of telling UK Docks to remove their shed or to rebuild it to the permitted dimensions but this was not done, instead, they told the protestors that the shed had been approved at a meeting in November 2013.

The were no drawings provided at the meeting to back that view and it turned out that there were not any. The drawings sent after the meeting were not authorised and/or contained mistakes and so the Council was left with maintaining the lie that was approved:

They did this by ignoring reasoned challanges.

During 2014 it became increasingly clear that the Council were avoiding the height issue altogether and by what they called a stage 3 response it was missing altogether. What had started the year as an observation the shed was taller and wider than permitted and the Council had done nothing about it ended up with the Council declaring that the shed was fine and that was what they told the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO).

During 2015 it became clear why they needed to misinform the LGO. It was simply to hide the lack of building control and the fact that no application for retrospective planning had been made. This allowed UK Docks to extend their shed without being questioned.

During 2016 the Council started telling anyone who had taken up our case that out complaints were unfounded allegations. Our complaints about UK Docks disturbing the peace on Sundays were overlooked as well and this continued into 2017.

Then it became clear, exactly how the Council were abusing the system, when they wilfully conflated the second and fifth conditions of the grant and later that year they did the same thing with the extension onto the footings laid in 2001. The post of Monitoring Officer was introduced during 2017 but it just became a dead mailbox while the post was held by Head of Legal Services because he hever answered any correspondence.

2018: it was discovered that while the Chief Executive can just ignore complaints about his staff the Council must consider complaints about the misconduct of Councillor. It took months and a lot of persistence to get a response from the Council and when they did, they just repeated the misinformation given to the LGO!

2019 UK Docks tell the MP and one of the Councillors that they have been given permission for their shed retrospectively some time in April. This is good news in that it finally puts paid to the lie that the shed is the approved height but it is not true. It means they have effectively replaced one lie with another which needs nipping in the bud, but it takes the Council more the six months to answer a yes or no question.

2020 a government agent palmerk@parliament.uk  is placed in the MP’s Office to ensure that ‘Misleading the Ombudsman’ does not come to the attention of Parliament.

All perfectly legal, my dear!