Dear Harry and Everyone,
Everyone, were those copied into email’s Bcc and included, the MP for South Shields, the Constituency Support Manager for the MP for Berwick, the Chief Executive, and the Head of the Council’s Legal Team, the ‘Monitoring Officer’ who has been handling our complaint that UK Dock’s ‘Shed’ is 3m taller than planned, those who attended the meeting in March 2014 where we decided to raise a Petition and finally, a few of those who were also aware that the shed had been built without planning permission.
Please see the attached document, provided to back the Trail of Deceit.
It describes a trail which began in September 2013 when a planning officer in South Tyneside Council told the protestors that the structure being erected near the mouth of the Tyne in South Shields had been given approval when it hadn’t and it looks like he was being economical with the truth because the Council’s Enforcement Officers stopped work in the yard about two weeks after it had begun when an approved document was recovered from the Council’s archives.
By the end of 2013, I had discovered with the help of another local resident, that there were also plans that had been approved by the Planning Manager a few weeks before the structure that was to become a large enclosure on a slipway (was began). Those plans proved that it was built nearly 3m taller than permitted.
Meanwhile at a meeting was held in the Town Hall on November 25th 2013, the original planning officer had gathered 4 persons who were prepared to support him in maintaining the lie about the shed’s height being approved and UK Docks were allowed to restart work on their shed in spite of the fact he would have known that one of the two approved drawing from 1996 would prove all five of them were perpetuating the misrepresentation made by UK Docks two and half months earlier.
By the time my complaint about the shed’s height, on behalf of the protestors was submitted, the tracks for the gantry crane had been fitted and that left the Planning Manager with a problem. He should, of course, have told UK Docks to stop work on the shed and they were in no position to protest as it could be easily shown that their claim that they had approval it was actually fraudulent.
He chose not to and because planning officers appear to be beyond the law, he was persuaded to back his Principal Planning Officer rather than reprimand him for gross misconduct and he achieved this by removing the original complaint from the public domain and adding to the misinformation about the shed’s height:-
- that the inland end of it was approved at 15.5m;
- that the gable end on the drawing he had approved in August 2013 also referred to the inland end of the shed and when that proved to be a lie as well –he said that;
- it was not to scale;
- later, when it was shown to be to scale, he claimed it was drawn after the Principal Planning Officer had inspected the framework.
So it went on, firstly with the Head of Development Services overwriting the fact that the original and one and only complaint that the shed was taller than planned had been deleted and enabled the fraud that UK Docks had approval for the shed to be repeated to the Ombudsman so that I, along with any of the other protestors could be falsely accused of making allegations.
Finally, to avoid being honest about the shed’s height a scheme was put in place to silence me by the misuse of a staff code in mid 2016 and although it fell into disuse it was revived by the Council Leader in 2021 on the advice of the Interim Head of Legal Services and is currently being exploited each April by the Chief Executive because he, like his predecessor has no wish to be honest about the shed’s height.
Yours sincerely
Michael Dawson