Dear Councillor Hamilton
I see from the Gazette last Sunday that UK Docks have won some orders for their yards on the Wear and Teesside. It looked like the Council were playing the ‘Jobs’ card but on reading the article one can see it has nothing to do with jobs on Tyneside.
I have no objection to Jonathan Wilson siting his headquarters on River Drive but I do object to his boat shed. It was built without planning permission and with the collusion of the planning department of South Tyneside Council.
I think the business with them misleading the Ombudsman ought to go to Parliament. After all, the second Inspector did not dispute what I said about the Council misinforming the first Inspector whatever the Council have told Emma.
The Monitor’s Office has had three weeks to respond and it looks like they are not going to, my complaint along with yours and Emma’s responses have been copied into toMP01Oct.pdf and attached. You say you have come up against a brick wall or been passed from pillar to post, we all have, starting as long ago as day 4, when Mr Cunningham referred Melanie to the ‘Complaints Procedure’ on September the 9th 2013.
The simple truth is that the shed is nearly 3m too high and you only have to look at either the only authorised drawing from 1966 with dimensions, or the Agent’s drawing produced for ST/1146/13/COND, to see that.
It is beginning to look like Cllr Anglin, whether he intended it not, was responsible for the for the shed being as big as it is (it is 5.5m longer, 3m taller and 1 meter wider than planned). UK Docks could not have used the footings laid in 2001 without creating a structure that did not have planning permission and the meeting was used to hide this.
There was more because the other two members of the residents committee besides me, Messrs Watson and Haig (Chairman and Treasurer respectively), were a manager and a director of a firm that would have been dependent for a living on the ship repair yards on the Tyne of which there were sadly very few (two?) and UK Docks was one. Their firm was HB Hydraulics which no longer appears to have a presence on Tyneside.
And there is more; after I had written that we were wrongly advised about the shed both Mr Cunningham and Graeme Watson (writing on behalf of his boss Ken Haig?) asked how I had gained access to the yard to measure width of the shed. I did not need to because one could sight along the frames from Greens Place at that time. I had found a way to disprove UK Docks claim the shed was approved and that obviously unnerved them.
The reason for this was, perhaps, that the extra width was a material consideration and the Council should have asked UK Docks to take the partially built shed down. UK Docks would then have had to remove it or make a retrospective application for the extra width. They would have got the extra width through planning but there was no certainty that they would have got the extra height through and they probably knew that as well.
They tried to hide the fact that it was to wide and then produced some rather suspect plans to con the planning department into thinking that the height had been approved. That to me was a fraud and we had spotted it long before the meeting, it was the reason we resurrected the Tyne Gateway Assn the why we were at the meeting. That we did not come away from the meeting with any approved plans says it all.
That is why when anyone, to this day, asks the Council about the planned height of the shed they are blanked or passed on to someone else. Either way, they refuse to answer the question and that is why we have not heard from the Monitor on the conduct of Cllr Anglin.
Kind regards,
Mick
Attachment: Cllr Assists STC in Deceit