The Second of these officers was the Planning Manager, Mr G Atkinson and it was he, to whom the complaint that not only was the shed taller than planned but it was wider as well was passed after Mr Cunningham had completed the first stage of the original complaint.
Mr Atkinson was on the horns of a dilemma: back or sack his errant Principal Planning Officer and as one can see he chose to back Mr Cunningham because the first thing he did, in the second stage response to the complaint about the height of the shed, was reinforce the lie started by Mr Haig at the meeting in November 2013 by wrongly attributing the 15.5m to its inland end.
Under the title, Approved Drawings, he reinforced the lie about the shed’s height by saying:-
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. At the riverside end the foundations are shown as 2.656m lower due to the gradient of the slipway. The structure would therefore be that much higher at the riverside end. 8296/1B is the same drawing captioned ‘Foundations Amended. All Frames Identical’
That much is true but notice when he says ‘All Frames Identical’ and the height of the river end from 8296/1B is 15.5m, so one must subtract the gradient from it to get the height of the frame at both ends and it is 12.8m. A little bit different to that from the height shown on the approved drawing 8296/2 but only by 10cm or half the width of this page, and in 12m that is less than 1%.
The Planning Manager was then challenged on the 24th January to produce the approved drawing and duly attached a copy of 8296/2 on the 28th January 2013.
It was one of four drawings associated with the permission granted in 1996 and showed that Council had known that the shed was 2.7m taller than planned since mid September 2013, and that meeting of November was a sham, called to bow to pressure from those who needed UK Docks to complete the shed quickly i.e. without planning permission and three come to mind, Nexus, the Port of Tyne and the Ministry of Defence.
Nexus, because the ferries in service with them in 2014 were longer than the shed for which UK Docks had permission and the Port of Tyne because UK Docks maintained their Pilot boats and without pilots the Port of Tyne, to all intents and purposes, would have to close and the MOD because they required any repairs or maintenance of their vessels to be done under cover.
About a week later I reminded him that boats enter the shed from the water:-
With reference to the drawing 8296/14 I have made no assumptions regarding this drawing but have taken my information from the drawing. There are three indicators that the elevation is the north end of the structure:
1. Detail notes on the drawing ” strips to draw back to each side to allow access for boats”
2. The section at the door jam shows the cladding on the downward i.e. North/river end.
3.The apparent use of third angle projection would imply that the door is at the north end.
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The third note was about the use of third angle projection was intended to show Mr Atkinson that on his preferred drawing, 8296/1A, the downhill end of the shed showed 15.5m which tied in with my 15.6m on 8296/14 and in his response he finally admitted that the shed was not built to approved plans but he went on to say with respect to 8296/14:-
The engineer chose to show a gable elevation of the structure (not drawn to scale) on the same drawing.
Like Mr Cunningham, he had been presented with a simple choice: to admit the truth about the shed’s height or to hide it and he chose the latter having modified his claim by swapping the lie about the gable elevation on 8296/14 referring to the road to one about it not being drawn to scale and in doing so reverted to his misrepresentation made in mid January that River Drive end of the shed had been approved at 15.5m and that was repeated by the Head of Development Services in his response to our Petition.
Nobody, except the Local Government Ombudsman has questioned the dimensions, that I added to the gable shown on 8296/14 (15.6m x 12.2m) in all nine years of its existence. In paragraph 31 of her findings, the Inspector says she has been talking to a senior planning officer and paragraph 37 of her findings contains two lies about the drawing. One being that it is not to scale and the other being that the draughtsman has not said to which end of the shed the main part of the drawing, refers.
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. . .. drawing shows an end with the panels in place to provide an impression of the final appearance. The drafter has not specified which end this is and the drawings are not to scale.
There is a note on drawing 8296/14, top left, which clearly says:-
Strips to draw back to each side
to allow access for boats.
to be kept closed during
cleaning operations.
With his admission, 20 or so of the residents, excluding Messrs Watson and Haig, held a meeting in the South Shields Sailing Club where it was explained that the gable end on 8296/14 referred to the river end, not the other end, and we decided to raise the Petition and I was tasked with thanking Mr Atkinson for his admission and because of his evasions regarding 8296/14, I referred to 8296/2:-
A meeting was held with members of the local community and I can now answer your question as to ‘what kind of action we would like the Council to take’. Thank you also for confirming that the Slipway Shed is not built to the approved 1996 plans.
I did not mention the Petition but I did ask him that the shed be removed or at least stop work on it while we discussed what should be done about it but he did nothing about it and the protestors heard nothing about it until his lie about shed’s height was repeated in Mr Mansbridge’ response to the Petition.
In order to complete their move from Tyne Dock, UK Docks needed a taller, wider and longer shed, than the one for which they had permission, especially to accommodate the Tyne Ferries then in use, and that was probably why they had given misleading plans to Mr Cunningham in the first week of September 2013 and I repeat, one was cropped with the height detail missing from the left hand edge and the other showed both ends of the shed to have a height of 15.5m in spite of the gradient.
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As you can see from the responses from both the Principal Planning Officer, Mr Cunningham, and the Planning Manager, Mr Atkinson, over following 4 months, they were content to back the lie that UK Docks had permission for their shed and it was not until I was sent a copy of 8296/2, attached to the email of the 28th of January did I and the other protestors, have proof of that not only were UK Docks lying about their shed but so were both the Planning Officers.
Their conduct was in total contrast to whoever stopped the work on the shed in September 2013 and by their conduct, I mean the conduct of Messrs Cunningham, Atkinson and Mansbridge. He or she and I believe to have been a Senior Enforcement Officer who would have seen the same evidence, much as I have outlined above and by reference to both approved and non-approved drawings, and seen that what UK Docks were building did not conform to any plans or drawings and it was in breach of the second condition from the day that the first two frames were erected.