These restrictions will be put in place immediately and will be reviewed in twelve months’ time. Yours sincerely, Paula Abbott, Information and Feedback Officer.
At your bidding, I assume, because it would have been you who had given Paula the edited list of unanswered emails and may I point out that it is not unreasonable to claim that a structure was 3m taller than planned when it is 3m taller than planned and I carefully explained this to her in May 2021, deliberately copying it to the Interim Head of Legal Services, J Rumney, rather than Cllr Dixon.
Cllr Hamilton’s letter to the Chief Executive, Mr J Tew reminded me that all was not well with STC and I ran a check on what Cllr Dixon and Mr Rumney were doing at the Town Hall and it linked well with Mr Buck’s threat of the 26th February 2020. The link between those at the Town Hall and Messrs Buck and Palmer being the word vexatious – see Chris Binding’s informative article of 28th February 2019.
Since Mr Buck posted his comment against his threat of 26-Feb-20, “Will you just give it a rest mate”, someone from the Town Hall has asked the Gazette to change the publication date from 26-Feb-19 to 07-Jul-20 in an attempt to break that link.
It is that sort of dishonesty, by Councils such as yours, that gives rise to vexatious behaviour but I defy you to produce anything even remotely vexatious, written by me, to you or any of your colleagues, since the height of the shed was first queried in September 2013.
Yours sincerely
Michael Dawson
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.