Sorry no, not while the Council avoid the question of the shed’s height. Your response, 16-Sep-16 made to my email of the 2nd September:-
Dear Mr Dawson
Thank you for your email and the copy of the letter sent to Mrs Johnson.
Mrs Johnson received your letter on her return to work 12 September and acknowledges its receipt.
For your information Michaela Green (nee Hamilton) is currently on secondment and therefore your email will be considered along with the letter to Mrs Johnson.
You will be contacted in due course following further checks into this matter.
There were no checks, one only has to glance at the approved drawing from 1996, 8296/2, to see that the shed is taller than permitted and the Corporate Lead was allowed to repeat much of the misinformation she had written on August 1st and carry out her threat to Section me in October 2016, so that the Chief Executive could avoid having to admit that the Local Residents were correct about the shed’s height and that a Senior Planning Officer had lied to the Ombudsman:- We will not acknowledge or respond to any issues that have already been the subject of investigation by the Council, or by the Local Government Ombudsman. Any such correspondence from you will be read and placed on file, but we will not acknowledge or respond to it.
Sorry, Alison and this is most important as it shows that the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) was in league with the Executive of South Tyneside Council (STC) in hiding the fact that the shed was taller than planned when he changed the complaint from one about the size of the shed to one about the lack of enforcement. Mr P Lewis for the Ombudsman wrote on the 30-May-2017:- However, after having read the decision by the Local Government Ombudsman in 2015, I consider that the matter of which you complain remains that of the lack of enforcement by the Council. The Local Government Ombudsman gave you full and detailed reasons for reaching her decision.
Sorry no, when I had pointed out that UK Docks were in breach of the 5th condition in late December 2016, the Council said that the site had no restrictions. Please note the fifth condition referred specifically to the use of the shed:- “No works, other than the launching or beaching of vessels, shall take place within the shelter between the hours of 7pm and 7am Monday to Saturday and not at all on Sundays or Bank Holidays unless any written consent of variation is previously given by the Development Corporation as local planning authority.
Sorry no, not until I get an apology from the Council’s Corporate Lead for repeating her claim that I was being unreasonable on 17-Jan-17, please see the critical review of the letter from her.
It would appear that there were some officers in the LGO who were as corrupt as some of those in STC and you have been asked to hide the facts behind both the redevelopment 71 Greens Place and UK Docks’ River Drive slipway by repeating, on 28-Apr-23, Mrs H Johnson’s unreasonable demand made six and a half years ago and repeating:- Any emails you make to officers of the Council regarding this subject, will not be acknowledged or responded to.
2
Your given reasons for hiding the truth about both No. 71 and UK Docks’ shed are unsound:-
I have noted a link to the Council’s Complaints Policy: https://www.southtyneside.gov.uk/article/71788/Complaints-Policy * and would refer you to Section 7 on Dealing with Unreasonable Behaviour. In my view, your behaviour is unreasonable because:
• persistent refusal to accept a decision; persistent refusal to accept explanations;
• continuing to contact us without presenting new and relevant information
• Adopting a ‘scattergun’ approach: pursuing a complaint or complaints with the authority and, at the same time, with a Member of Parliament/a councillor/ independent auditor/the Standards Board/local police/solicitors/the Local Government Ombudsman/the press.
Firstly, the link to Article 71788 given in the contact review fails with the message “Sorry, the page you requested is not available” but more importantly and unlike you, I refuse to accept decisions based on fraudulent misrepresentations, one of them being that the Haigs had completed the redevelopment of their property in accordance with ST/0966/12/FUL.
The first stage was where the complaint raised in January 2014, with evidence that the shed was both taller and wider than permitted, was referred back to the Tyne Gateway Assn instead of being addressed by the Principal Principal Planning Officer Mr P Cunningham.
The second stage was where the Planning Manager, Mr G Atkinson admitted that the objectors were correct about the shed but had seeded his response with a major piece of misinformation which was later to reappear in the Ombudsman’s findings.
The admission that the residents were right about the shed’s height was overwritten by the then Head of Development Services, Mr G Mansbridge by repeating the lie about its height, firstly in his response to the Petition and then in what was actually a third stage but presented to me, the other protestors and most importantly to the staff responsible for the Chief Executive’s response as a second response.
What was in fact a fourth stage was then submitted to the Ombudsman as a third stage and she chose to believe a Senior Planning Officer who had provided her with a faux Stage 3 response rather than a resident who had given her proof that the shed was taller than planned, cf paragraph 36.
I had been forced to refer the complaint about UK Docks’ shed being both wider and taller than permitted to the Ombudsman because South Tyneside Council was using a corrupted version of their complaints procedure to drive it forward and exhaust the complaints procedure internally through the various stages as outlined in the guide.
The practice is somewhat different and in the case of the shed there were four stages, not three, per the guide and that was why I called the review of the timeline I shared with the residents and the Council in 2021, Shed and Corruption.
The complaint flew through its fourth stage because the author failed to mention the height of the shed at all and the lie that it had been built to the approved height, reappeared in paragraph 33 of the Ombudsman’s Findings.