The Back Pass
Mr Cunningham will have known that the shed was wider than planned and it was possible but unlikely that he still believed UK Docks fraudulent claim for the height at landward end. The complaint of January 10th, showed that we had proof that they had been lying to him and he should have referred the complaint to Building Control, not passed it back to the TGA.
In my book, both of theses offences, the lack of registration of the complaint and the back pass are serious misdemeanours and both indicate that he was misusing or corrupting the complaints procedure, to avoid answering for the Council’s actions or in this case, the lack of planning control.
M Dawson, 2021
The fact remains that Mr Cunningham did not register our complaint and by referring us back to the meeting meant that he was as good as repeating UK Docks fraudulent claim and it was obvious that we were no further forward than we were in September. The meeting had established that the shed was taller than planned and that left the question about retrospective planning unanswered.
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Therefore until I have some satisfactory answers to my very reasonable questions I do not consider this matter closed. If you are unable to supply me with answers to my questions could you please pass the issue to someone who can.
The Planning Manager, Mr Atkinson did nothing to resolve the situation because he sided with Mr Cunningham by saying the shed had been approved:
Approved Drawings. The drawing that was submitted on 11th April 1996 with the application is numbered 8296/1A. That shows the overall height of the structure as 15.5m above the foundation level at the landward end.
Mr Atkinson showed that he was party to the decision to remove the complaint from Planning Enquiries when he said: “The dimensions of the steelwork have been checked on site and they are in accordance with the measurements shown on the approved drawings. He echoed the lie told to us in December, see reference at the top of page 2, though Mr Cunningham used the word ‘compliant’ to falsely claim that the shed had been approved.
Mr Atkinson also mentioned another drawing, 8296/2 and said it was one of two drawings that had been approved so I asked him to produce them, 24-Jan-14: Why have these two drawings not been provided to residents and why are they not available on the planning portal?
He made excuses but he did actually produce them with his response on January 28th, five months after you had asked Mr Cunningham for the equivalent, in your email of 13-Sep-13. The one that was never answered, which led to us setting up the TGA. Besides his excuses, Mr Atkinson’s response was riddled with misinformation and I will highlight two worst of them:
1. “It is therefore reasonable to say that 8296/1A, 8296/1B, 8296/2 and 8296/4 represent the development which was approved in 1996.” – this is only true if one accepts that the dimension on the river end is correct giving a landward end of 12.7m not 15.5m which is shown in error on either 8296/ 1A or 1B. 1A showed each end of the shed had the same height, 15.5m and one must be wrong and the same applies to 1B!
2. “the 15.6m height is the height to River Drive and the height on the river side is some 3m greater.” – an obvious lie the gable drawing to which he was referring was of the river end. Boats enter the shed from the river!
He like Mr Cunningham avoided the central question, why, when the second condition of the grant: The development to which this permission relates shall be carried out in complete accordance with the approved plans and specifications are they still working on their shed?
In his last response, 13-Feb-14, he conceded that we were correct about the shed when he wrote: 3 the current structure is not built to “approved” plans and as one can see were discussing the height of the shed when he made that admission. It was this pair of emails that we circulated at the public meeting held in the Little Haven Sailing Club on the 3rd of March 2014 and raise a Petition and I would write to them about the shed.
I cannot remember if I highlighted the worst misrepresentations but they were recorded and the one about the scale survived and was repeated to the Local Government Ombudsman. Mr Atkinson said: “why did we determine the elevation on 8296/14 is the south end? The drawing was submitted in discharge of condition 4 relating to fixing details of the end panels. Those details are the 1:10 sections and elevations at the left hand side of the sheet. The engineer chose to show a gable elevation of the structure (not drawn to scale) on the same drawing.”
The south end is the road end the gable elevation faces the river and is the north end and there is a note about allowing access to boats and as everyone should know – the boats arrive from the river;
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The elevation is drawn to scale a scale of 1:100 so it would have been very easy to verify the planned height of it. I got 15.6m but then again I was reading from an A4 pdf document on a curved glass screen in South Shields Library in late 2013. It was not the 18m that Mr Cunningham found it to be, in September of that year.
As you know, nothing was done despite numerous complaints from many people including me.
All he did was to acknowledge the reciept of our wish list. UK Docks continued with work on their shed and they even put it to use without doors on either end when they took a Port of Tyne Tug onto the slipway 17th March but by then UK Docks had become a law unto themselves.
When it came to the Gazette repeating the misinformation about the shed in an article about our Petition on the 1st April 2014. I wrote to his manager on the 4th but I later learnt that it was passed back Mr Atkinson and is still awaiting attention as is the complaint of 10-Jan-14.