Hiding the Duplicity of the Planning Manager
On April 13th I received a message from a simonwrs@gmail.com attached to a page with the title Threat: Simon Buck, 26-Feb-20 and it was received with a great deal of scepticism on my part. You can tell this from the content of the email sent to the person delegated hide the truth behind UK Docks’ shed built on their slipway off River Drive on the South Bank of the Tyne in South Shields on the 28th April 2023.
Ms Hoy has been used by various South Tyneside Council officers to misdirect correspondence to the South Tyneside Council, as shown in Part 8 of Shed and Corruption and she has quite accurately recorded not only emails that have either been sent or copied to Customer Advocacy but also one or two that have neither been sent or copied to her.
It appears that is not only I who has been questioning them about truth of the claims made by Council Officers and Councillors about UK Docks’ shed.
When determining whether a development has permission or not, it would seem reasonable to refer to plans and drawings that have been approved by the relevant body and it should be a given that any that have not been approved should be discarded. Also when sharing a timeline with a council and people complaining about the conduct of its officers, one has to pay particular attention to the sequence of events.
As you can see from Part 8 of Shed and Corruption, Ms Hoy had been used by South Tyneside Council for a number of years to divert attention from the amount of misinformation given to the Ombudsman by planning officers. With regards to the shed, it was her letter of the 9-Dec-15 that I took to a solicitor in Sunderland, but it was not the first time she had called upon to redirect a question.
She had been used to divert attention, two years earlier, concerning a complaint about the party wall erected between between 70 and 71 Greens Place, in South Shields in 2013 and that was in a letter to me dated 13-Nov-13:- You had noted three points you remained unhappy with, please note that point one had been decided by the Ombudsman and we will not address that point further following their decision.
The row with the owner of 71 Greens Place, first rested on whether the planning officer had followed the guide SPD9 and then on whether the original property and its extension should be allowed to occupy 100% of the property but they told the Ombudsman that the guide had been followed and ignored the second point completely. Thirdly they ignored the fact that the plans for the partition wall between that 70/71 Greens place were not followed.
As I said in the Prologue, page 2:-
Her wilful disregard of the guidance given in SPD9 had obliged South Tyneside Council to mislead the Ombudsman into believing she had followed the SDP9 guidelines when it was very obvious that she had done nothing of the sort.
When I discovered that the complaint against the party wall had been dismissed by Customer Advocacy, with the help of the Planning Manager in late 2013 I decided to concentrate on UK Docks’ shed. Initially it was identified that permission for the development of No. 71 would have to be looked at retrospectively before permission could be granted but the architect, Dr Martin was persuaded to redraw the partition wall to remove that requirement.
Dr Martin obviously considered himself to be above the law in this respect.
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With the UK Dock’s shed it was different and while the architect had been instructed to redraw it with a different shape, they did not increase its overall dimensions.
I took the decision when I was reviewing the timeline that I shared with South Tyneside Council to base the Corruption Series on UK Docks’ shed rather than a party wall in Greens Place because I did not wish to raise the complex issue of party wall agreements and I assumed it was obvious to anyone with even a moderate understanding of an architectural drawing that, the shed was taller than planned and that Mr G Atkinson was lying when he said it was not.
With the shed, the complaint was that it was taller than planned and Mr Atkinson eventually agreed with me but told his manager otherwise and again the question of granting permission retrospectively arose and it the duplicity of Mr Atkinson, the Planning Manager that I wish to address in this letter. To put it simply, he said to his line manager that UK Docks had approval for their shed after he had agreed with the other protestors and I that they had no such thing.
I challenged Ms Hoy by saying I will not give it a rest in Deceit and Dishonesty until various Council planning and management officers admit that they have been generally dishonest about the shed on the slipway, off River Drive, since September 2013 because it was she who extended the misuse of Section 7 of of the Council’s Complaints Policy. First by asking Paula Abbott to do it in April 2021, then by herself in April 2022 and again in April 2023.
With UK Docks’ shed it was much simpler than a party wall that spanned three floors because the approved drawing 8296/2 clearly shows that the landward end of the shed should have a height of 12.7m but we had been told otherwise, at a Town Hall meeting in late 2013. Before the meeting I had worked out what the height of landward end of structure shown on 8296/1B also to be about 13m rather than 15.5m but later it was replaced by 8296/1A and the corrected height is better shown on the extract that I took from that drawing.
There is a considerable overhead in keeping a record of visitors to a site and there is a security issue as well and so I do not bother and it is rare that I will glean such a thing as an IP address for instance. The one for simonwrs@gmail.com was different from simon.buck@ parliament.uk and it was the primary reason for me not believing it was Simon Buck who wished:- “Will you just give it a rest mate!
It did however provide me a timely excuse to tidy and resurrect my Shed and Corruption series and Part – 20 was sent to Alison Hoy on the of the 2nd of May. The main content, Deceit and Dishonesty was an attempt to condense ten years of dealing with a corrupt council into half a dozen pages and I had to drop the contribution played by the Planning Manager, Mr Gordon Atkinson, because I could scarcely say to Alison:- Sorry no, not until I get an apology from him for claiming that the shed had approval, when he no longer worked for South Tyneside Council.
It made made no sense to say to Alison, in the letter of the 2nd May, sorry no, not until the former Planning Manager, Mr Gordon Atkinson admits to his duplicity in agreeing with me and other protestors that the shed was indeed about 3m taller than the approved drawings allowed, while telling his Manager that it was not taller but the point remains and one only had to look at the approved drawing from 1996 to see that the shed was indeed about 2.8m taller than permitted.
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Mr P Cunningham originally had the choice of releasing copies of drawings that proved that the protestors, such as I, were right when we claimed the shed was taller than planned or to repeat the fraudulent misrepresentation that the structure that was to become the shed had been approved.