Shed and Corruption – Part 2

Shed and Corruption - Part 2
From: mick.dawson@theharbourview.co.uk
Date: 12/04/2021 (11:31:07 GMT)
To: Cllr David Francis
Cc: Melanie Todd, Alison Hoy, Hayley Johnson, Nicola Robason

2 Attachments: Shed and Corruption - 2.pdf 
               The Shed and Corruption - Part 1.pdf

You forwarded this message on 14/04/2021 14:45:16 to: 
 John.Rumney@southtynside.gov.uk>.

Dear David,

The Shed and Corruption – Introduction to Part 2

While I was trying to establish that UK Docks had not been given permission retrospectively for the enclosure (shed) on their slipway off River Drive, I think it was you who pointed out that I should not be writing to the Head of Legal Services but to Nicola Robason. The job of Monitoring Officer had been given to her and for the first time for many years, December 2019, I got an honest response from the Council when she said:

“I can confirm that the Council as Local Planning Authority has not received a retrospective planning application from UK Docks.

On reflection I should have have thanked the pair of you but what I really wanted was an admission that the shed was actually nearly 3 meters taller than planned.
Her honesty went further when she added: It is entirely a matter for UK Docks to decide whether or not to submit such an application and the Council has no influence in that matter. However that points to a very high level of collusion between Council Staff and UK Docks.

The Planning Manager had conceded by mid February 2014 that it was taller than planned as you will see from my letter to Melanie of 12th March (The Shed and Corruption – Part 1). He had very carefully worded his misrepresentation about the shed’s height of mid January 2014 and it took 3 further emails to get to the truth about it but not before he seeded the fraudulent misrepresentation that the drawing provided by the Agents, Maughan Reynolds Partnership in September 2013, was not drawn to scale.

By the time we get to the Ombudsman it had become an outright lie with the misinformation fed to the Ombudsman by a senior planning officer – see #21 and #33 in Part 1, by a Senior Planning Officer. In paragraph 37 she says:-

. . The drafter has not specified which end this is and the drawings are not to scale.

Not only has the draughtsman stated that the strip curtains are to be drawn aside to allow the boats to enter and it appears that it is not common knowledge that boats come up the slipway from the river and yet the Ombudsman says in #37:

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.

I wrote to Melanie in ‘The Shed and Corruption – Part 1’, because I knew that she was the first person to directly question the Principal Planning Officer, Mr Cunningham, about the height of the shed in September 2013:

From the stamp date on the revised plans, you have received plans on the 06.09.13 the day after construction commenced which show a(n) increased height to the structure to that which was originally approved in 1996. Has the revised height of 15.5metres been approved or is it in breach of the 1996 Planning approval?

He directed her to the Council’s Complaints Procedure (CCP) instead of answering her question and logic rather than anything else provides the answer and it was in breach of the planning approval. That was why UK Docks were ordered to stop work on their shed and did not restart until after the Tyne Gateway Assn (TGA) were misled about UK Docks having approval for it, again, by Mr Cunningham.
When he was asked to produce some evidence after the Town Hall meeting in November 2013 he failed because all he did was to replace the drawing given to him by UK Docks with one the Council produced from their archive. Neither had been approved because they contained the same error, described by Melanie as ‘the revised height of 15.5metres’.
On reviewing Part 1 it occured to me that besides UK Docks plans giving the appearance of having been doctored one could tell from the dates on them that they could never have been approved in 1996 and that was why Mr Cunningham switched (to) the archive drawing.
As I have shown in Part 1 the lie that the was not nearly 3m taller than planned became so embedded that through each stage of the Council’s Complaints Procedure (CCP) it became more and more difficult for them to admit the truth and that included the office of the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO).
They could then tell any enquirers, be they other residents, Councillors such as yourself, MPs and most importantly the Press that any objections were based on allegations and that is an unfounded allegation in itself!
I discovered that they were doing this when I put in a complaint about a money laundering scam on Greens Place but there were difficulties in proving that Planning Office and or Building Control were misinterpreting the ‘rules’ and turning a blind eye to the variation from the plans.
It did not help that they kept on ‘losing’ plans and correspondence either!
UK Docks’ shed was different, mainly because I kept a record of the drawings (plans) and the correspondence on a website that was set up to collect signatures for our Petition in the Spring of 2014. Security issues meant it best to delete the data held for that exercise but the form used to collect it lived on for few years but even that was superseded by modern applications, such as one gets on a mobile phone.
In Part 1, I naturally addressed the problems that we, that is Melanie and I, encountered while our time-lines were merged but my troubles with South Tyneside Council started eighteen months before that with the development in Greens Place and I shall address those in Part 2 of the ‘Shed and Corruption’ which I have attached.
Secondly I will show that the corruption, in the case of UK Docks, actually stems from August of 2013 and thirdly, I will highlight some instances that should really be addressed by those appointed to look into corruption in local services.
Sad to say, after ten years of austerity they are short supply, so it’s up us to make a noise about it.

Kind regards,
Mick Dawson

This entry was posted in Abuse of Complaints System, Corruption. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Shed and Corruption – Part 2

  1. mick dawson says:

    The deletion was done by a planning officer, with the permission of her manager, overwriting ST/0479/13/FUL with ST/0479/13/HFUL.

  2. Michael David James Dawson says:

    Page 2 – it was not Adele but Mandy Ali, the Investigator in charge of my complaint against 71 Greens Place, owner Mr Haig. She had asked me to review her provisional finding and I said I was awaiting the outcome of ST/0479/13/FUL but the Council deleted it and it came to nothing.

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