Dear Emma,
Cllr Anglin and the meeting at the Town Hall 25-Nov-13.
I wrote to you on the 1-Oct thanking you for taking notice of my complaint.
You will know by now the Council did eventually acknowledge my complaint and they used a secure platform, Egress File Encryption, to send it on the 12-Oct. I have now received their response through the same medium which is extremely tiresome. The secure platform was totally unnecessary and only served to confirm my suspicion that the Council was not interested in doing anything about the misuse their complaints procedure.
The issue about the shed being oversize should have been resolved between the Council and UK Docks long before there was any need to resurrect the Tyne Gateway Association (TGA) and therefore a long time, and I’m talking months rather than weeks, before the meeting, where we were told the shed was compliant or ‘legal’.
Cllr Anglin had all but promised to find out for us if the shed was in fact built to plan but he had shifted or allowed the change of agenda of the meeting to slip from finding out those rather vital details to a trivial discussion about some future expansion plans by UK Docks.
We were simply told that the shed had been built to approved plans while the Council knew that it had not. The development was the responsibility of Mr Cunningham and it was in beach of planning control long before the meeting but did he nothing about it.
I had told Cllr Anglin that we had been misinformed and we both came away from the meeting without any documentary evidence from Mr Cunningham to back up what we had been told and this was at the heart of my complaint. That we came away from the meeting without any approved drawings says everything and the fact that both the Chair of the TGA and he moved the agenda away from gathering evidence to a discussion shows that they were in it up to their necks along with Mr Cunningham.
This brings me to Ms G Hayton’s response, finally on the 12th December, nearly three months after I made my complaint and she said nothing about my main charge against Cllr Anglin. If he had been as diligent as I and made sure we had stuck to the agenda i.e. ascertain whether the shed had been built to plan or not, then the shed would probably not have been completed as we see it now.
I also have to thank Angela for her interest and will detail her the failings of Ms Hayton’s response and will just copy you and Stephen Hepburn for information for the time being.
Using the Ombudsman to cover up maladministration is in my mind a very serious offence and I think it will be up to Parliament to do something about it in the end. Don’t think this device to get errant officers off the hook is exclusive to South Tyneside Council.
I reckon you both have more important things to think about at the moment, like Brexit. Why don’t the Tories, get their act together, write a nice letter of apology to the other Member States of the EU for wasting their time, and we can all exit Brexit with at least a little bit of dignity.
Kind regards,
Michael.