More importantly it was the only drawing mentioned in the approval of the change in section of the shed and my notes with regard to the width and height and have never been questioned in the eight years and a half years of its existence [12.2 and 15.6].
UK Docks restarted work on their shed within a week or so of the Town Hall meeting between the TGA and the Council in November 2013 and in the New Year the started to install the bed for their overhead crane and I submitted my one and only complaint about the height and width of the shed on January 10th 2014 with reference to 8296/14.
The Council had retrieved a copy of an approved print of a drawing 8296/2 in September which showed that the complaint of the 10th January was justified but the Principal Planning Officer had passed the an unapproved print to the TGA to suggest otherwise. I had given him the opportunity to admit his mistake but he declined it:- My understanding is that the responses that I had provided to you at this meeting enabled the matter to be closed.
He does not retract and the complaint is taken up by his manager, who was again presented with a same choice, i.e. to admit that the shed is to tall, stop UK Docks progress on their shed the apologise to us for the STC having wasted our time or back his Principal Planning officer. He chose the latter by lying about the shed’s height, 15-Jan-14:- The dimensions of the steelwork have been checked on site and they are in accordance with the measurements shown on the approved drawings.
5
One would assume that when discussing whether a structure has met the conditions to restrict its size one would be referring to prints of drawings that gave the approved sizes but not so with STC. I was not happy with his response and told him so:- “Dear Mr Atkinson, Thank you for reply. However, I am not satisfied that my questions have been answered. The core matter is that the structure we see on Riverside Drive is not consistent with any of the drawings you have provided.
Notice the PROTECT in his response on the 28th January. The truth was out when he sent me a copy of 8296/2 and the ‘protect’ was a warning to others in STC not to repeat the lie that 8296/14 refers to the River Drive end:- “In fact the 15.6m height is the height to River Drive and the height on the river side is some 3m greater.
There was no PROTECT on his first attempt to hide the truth about the shed’s height on 15th of January, because 8296/1A and 1B do show a height of the landward end as 15.5m:- “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.
However it is simply a lie to claim that it represents the approved height of the shed. That is represented by the 15.5m height shown on the river end of the shed.
On the 28th he adds that the Council are in possession of an approved drawing from 1996, 8296/2 and it not only shows the value of 8296/14 in proving that the other residents and I were correct about the shed’s height, it shows that all except myself at the meeting in November 2013 had found it in their interest to perpetuate the misrepresentation given by UK Docks in September.
In reality he had replaced one lie with another to hide the fact that the shed was 2.7m taller than planned and like his Principal Planning Officer attempted to revert to a previous stage in complaint:-
“I can only suggest that if you do wish to pursue this matter further you ask that my Head of Service, George Mansbridge, responds to any remaining points you may have formally under stage 2 of the Council’s complaints procedure.
The Planning Manager and I were already at the second stage of a complaint because of his Principal Planning Officer’s conduct at the Town Hall meeting, following which, he passed us plans, 8296/1A or 1B to back the false claim made by UK Docks that they had approval with regard to the shed’s height.
My partner at the time who was quite used to dealing with people making fraudulent claims gave me a hand with my next observations about the responses to my complaint made on the 10th January and together we tried a new approach by combining the reply with response and extracted some truth for a change by way of an admission:-“the current structure is not built to approved plans (n.b. see note above about the plans)
The note above, about the plans said:- 8296/2 and 8296/4 at A1 size are to the scale stated on each plan; it is therefore reasonable to say the four plans are consistent,
He was not being reasonable or consistent. He had not mentioned the two drawings, 8296/1A and 8296/1B. They show a gradient of 2.7m between each end and both ends to have the same height of 15.5m. This can only be true if the shed had the same slope along its length as the slipway and it does not. The dimension given on 8296/2 shows that the landward end should be 2.7m less and that makes the height 12.8m and not what is written in either 8296/1A or 1B.
6
These drawings are not in the public domain with the possible exception of 8296/14 but can be viewed on Drawings | HV Documents (theharbourview.co.uk). UK Docks restarted work on their shed within days of the meeting of 25-Nov-13 and while the decision to allow the restart was not entirely down to Mr Cunningham, it was his choice to send us copies of 1A and 1B rather than 8296/2 and that is why the Council are still evading the question of the shed’s height.
In his email of the 13th February, the Planning Manager, went on to say in defence of his Principal Panning Officer: 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.
By this point the had racked up yet another fraudulent misrepresentation – that the gable end on 8296/14 is not drawn to scale. It was not drawn to the same scale as the Section at the Door Jamb, 1 in 20 but it was drawn to a scale of 1:100 and if one expands it so that the roof bean is 7mm deep [= 686mm at 1:100], easily done on a standard PC or Laptop screen these days, one will come up with 12.2cm and 15.6cm for the width and height, much as I did eight years ago.
There was so much misinformation in his admission of the 13th February that I had to point out that Mr Atkinson and I were discussing 8296/14 and not his and Mr Cunningham’s choice of 8296/1A when the residents, minus the rump of the TGA, met in the yacht club to discuss the admission by Planning Manager on behalf of the STC:- “the current structure is not built to approved plans.
When I said “Tyne Slipway and Engineering and its owner, as the only obstacle to the closure of Tyne Dock, in a very powerful position because they had to find a new home on the Tyne and there was only one viable option” I was was rather downplaying the argument as the conditions under which the Wilsons acquired the ownership Tyne Slipway and Engineering business, the one off River Drive, were shrouded in secrecy.
However they blotted their copy book by giving a set of drawings to the Principal Planning Officer of South Tyneside Council to falsely claim that they had approval for what was to become UK Docks’ shed on River Drive. All they had to do then, was to sit back and let the Council’s Planning Office and their Managers make sure that ‘due’ process did not interfere with their plans for the shed we see today.