History shows he chose to claim the latter and he did this by providing drawings to back his decision and while he never used the word legal to mean approved, he knew as well as I did, that to say of a structure, “the work meets all the necessary legal requirements” to mean it had been approved, was a fraud.
He was therefore being a little more than economical with the truth when he explained during our meeting that the base and height of the structure are compliant. One is entitled to ask, with what plans was the structure compliant and it does not take much to work out that the first plans he copied across were provided to back the deception that UK Docks had approval for their shed and that was fraudulent.
He did not know that I had been made aware of the drawing 8296/14 associated with Decision Notice, ST/1146/13/COND, and that also showed that the shed was taller that which had been approved. The notice had been approved by the Planning Manager, Mr G Atkinson in October 2013 and it showed that the shed, as well as being 2.7m taller than planned, was nearly a meter wider.
Work had stopped on the shed in September 2013 so one could safely assume that UK had been told to stop working on it because it was oversize but as soon as Mr Cunningham had sent out non-approved plans following the meeting held in the Town hall on 25th November 2013 work resumed on it and when the big cranes arrived to fit an overhead travelling crane in to the extra roof space in January 2014 I sent in a complaint on January 10th 2014 based on drawing 8296/14 and asked:-
“As the applicant has not discharged condition 2 why is there no retrospective planning application?
This was covered in what was to become Part 1 of the Shed and Corruption Series and as one can see, Mr Cunningham chaired a meeting with two Councillors, a director and procurement officer of a firm based in Hampshire, HB Hydraulics and it was to divert attention from the fact that the shed was taller than planned else why did he issue plans to back UK Docks claim that it was not taller than planned.
Mr Atkinson did no better than Mr Cunningham and while he agreed with us, that the shed was indeed too tall he chose not to do anything about it and allowed UK Docks to complete their shed. He knew as well as I did that the shed was 3m taller than permitted but it was his choice not to take disciplinary action over Mr Cunningham’s conduct following Town Hall meeting of the 25th November 2013 and that led to his duplicity about the shed’s height.
By the end of 2013 I had worked out from my dealings with my neighbour that South Tyneside Council were probably working with the Local Government Ombudsman to hide malfeasance on the part of enforcement and the planning officers and I touched upon this in the Prologue to Shed and Corruption which linked the trouble I had with the Council with Mr Haig’s development of his wife’s property with the trouble the local residents and I had with them over the redevelopment of UK Docks’ slipway.
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The shed was different in that there were drawings in existence that included a major error and it appears that it was Mr K Haig’s support for UK Docks at the meeting of the 25th November allowed them to restart work on it:-
KH advised that they had seen the plans which were date stamped 1996, the structure is 15.5m. Proper drawings were on file and there is nothing illegal about the structure.
Mr Haig has cannily avoided truth in that statement by saying there was nothing illegal about it while at the same time the approved drawings on file, 8296/2 and 8296/14 showed that the structure was nearly 3m taller than permitted.
We had seen some plans but they were not proper drawings because they contained errors so he like Mr Cunningham was lying if he meant that UK Docks had approval for their shed. It was four months after that meeting that I wrote and thanked the Planning Manager for agreeing with the other protestors and I, about the shed’s height: Thank you also for confirming that the Slipway Shed is not built to the approved 1996 plans
The problem was that Mr Atkinson has agreed with us about the height of the shed but they had not stopped work to complete it 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 add himself to those who denied that there was anything wrong with the height of the shed because it saved him with not only the bother of having to deal with his errant Principal Planning Officer but his Planning Manager as well and detail of how it was done was partly explained in Part 2 of Shed and Corruption.
Detail of the Planning Manager’s duplicity:-
Let me say that nobody in nine years, apart from the Ombudsman, has questioned the dimensions of the height and width written on the A4 copy of drawing 8296/14 and Planning Manager avoided the issue when he said, in response to my request that they stop work on the shed, March 2014:- This is a complex matter and will take some time.
It was not a complex matter. The approved plan shows the shed to be taller than permitted and they stopped the work on the shed within hours, following its retrieval in September 2013.
He said on the 15th of January, that 8296/1A had been approved, when it had not, and went on to confirm his misrepresentation about the shed’s height on the 28th January with reference to 8296/14 when he said that the height of river end of the shed was the road end:-
“In fact the 15.6m height is the height to River Drive and the height on the river side is some 3m greater.
The gable end shown on drawing 8296/14 is the of the river end of the shed. It appears that he was lying about which end of the shed was which, because he was preparing the way for his boss, The Head of Development Services to mislead everyone including the Ombudsman.
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As I have shown, I had written and thanked South Tyneside Council via the Planning Manager for his admission that the shed was, as we said, nearly 3m taller that permitted but I had not told him that we had decided to raise a Petition. We started gathering signatures for our Petition following the meeting in the local sailing club in March 2014.
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.
And added:- 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. It was following queries raised in mid-January that that the plans were re-examined.
The misrepresentation to which end 8296/14 referred, was such an obvious lie, that it was replaced by another a month later:- “The engineer also chose to include a gable elevation of the structure on the same drawing but that was not drawn to scale.
The Local Government Ombudsman repeated, in the first few months of 2015, much of the misinformation/misrepresentation generated in the first two months of of 2014 by the Planning Manager:-
- Paragraph 34, I have seen the 1996 plans. On plan 1/B the applicant has written the proposed elevations at the inland end as 12.5 metres plus 3 metres. Mr X says the Council should not have taken the applicant’s word for this.
The proposed height is 9.8m + 3m. - Paragraph 35, In January 2014 the Council wrote to Mr X about this. It said the overall structure on the plans is 15.5 metres at the land end and the foundations are 2.656 metres lower at the river end due to the gradient. It said it had taken measurements on site and the shed as built matches these measurements. Since then the Council has consistently told Mr X the shed is the correct height.
Wrongly, see Truth about 1B, 2nd ref, Page 2 - Paragraph 36, I have seen the report written for the planning committee by officers of the Development Corporation in 1996. The report says the height is 15.5 metres. Mr X says it does not specify which end is 15.5 metres.
Not true, Mr X did not mention the report because it did not specify which end if the shed had a planned height of 15.5m but he did explain the shortcomings of 8296/1A to the Ombudsman.
The drawings produced by the Council and UK Docks showed both ends to have a height of 15.5m and I repeat, anyone, with even a most elementary knowledge of architectural drawings would have noticed, that the drawings sent to the Ombudsman in 2015 showed the height of each end of the shed as 15.5m and that could only be true if the shed’s roof had the same slope as the slipway.
The roof is level so only one of them is right and a cursory look at the approved drawing 8296/2 will show, that the 15.5m at the river end of the shed, is correct. The Ombudsman
contradicts this, in paragraph 37 of her findings:- “Mr X says plan 14 shows 15.5 metres as the river end height. The Council has explained to Mr X why this is not the case.
When I said nobody in nine years has questioned the dimensions for the height and width
written on drawing the A4 copy 8296/14 apart from the Ombudsman, it was because she said in paragraph 37:-
“The drafter has not specified which end this is and the drawings are not to scale”
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