The problem was that Mr Atkinson has agreed with us about the height of the shed but UK Dock had not stopped work to complete it, 20-Mar-14, and the ‘and more’ was the Petition. When I had written and thanked Mr Atkinson for conceding that the local residents were correct about the shed’s height, I had not told him that we had planned to raise a petition.
It had gathered 200 + signatures while work progressed on the shed and Mr Mansbridge found it much easier to ‘bin’ the Petition, and at the same time add himself to the list of those who denied that there was anything wrong with the height of the shed. In his response to our Petition the Head of Development Services, Mr G Mansbridge, repeated the main lie about the shed’s height:-
The approved dimensions of the steelwork are, • Proposed height 15.5m at the River Drive end.
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Not only did it save him the bother of having to deal with his transgressing Principal Planning Officer and his duplicitous Planning Manager but it meant he had to corrupt the Council’s Complaints Procedures as well and he did this by replacing my complaint with another.
Once the Council had allowed UK Docks to restart work to complete the shed following the meeting of 25th November 2013 when the Principal Planning Officer fell into a trap of his own making. It was set when the drawing of the shed with vertical sides produced for UK Docks in August 2013 but not made available until mid December and it was 8296/14 but by then he had said:- Mr Dawson, I have measured this on site and have copied the 1996 plans across to you twice already etc.
The vertical sides pointed straight to the footings and indicated that the shed was a metre wider than planned and that he was lying – see 2nd to last item on the trail. The claim about the accuracy was a little far fetched as I had not taken account of parallax errors introduced by the distance between Greens Place and the framework for the shed but in response to our Petition Mr Mansbridge agreed with me about its width but not that it was taller than the approved plan, 2-May-14:-
Apart from the width these dimensions are either entirely in accordance with the approved plan, or subject to such minor deviation that they are properly categorised as non-material changes.
South Tyneside Council were then trapped in web of corruption from which the only escape is to admit they have been lying about the shed’s height since September 2013 and I explained how they maintained the lie this day in a letter Anne-Marie in September 2022.
M Dawson
19 July 2023