My observation about the conduct of the two planning officers on May 2nd was not my first attempt to advise the Head of Development Services about the fraud.
Mr Atkinson had written on the 21st March:-
Thank you for your email. Before the Council makes any decisions on the planning aspects of this case, we need to have a full understanding of the history of the site, and analyse all the facts. This is a complex matter and will take some time.
It was not a complex matter, the approved drawing from 1996 says the shed should have a height of 12.7m not 15.5m, all one had to do was take the height of the footings from 8296/1A or 1B – 96.1m and subtract it from the height of the shed given on 8296/2 (108.8m) giving 12.7m.
It appears that the Council had made the decision to back the fraud that UK Docks had permission for the shed that one sees today when they allowed the ‘Shed Load of Grief’ article to appear in the local press:-
| To cap it all there was an article in the local paper on Apr 1st showing most flattering photograph of the offending shed saying that it was only 36ft high. The author of the article may have got away with saying that in September but not now. You should know that it is over 50 ft high and that is what we have been saying for months now. It’s planned height is about 42ft. |  |
I had written to the Head of Development Services because the Planning Manager had joined his Principal Planning Officer and the Executive of the Tyne Gateway Assn in their desire to hide the fact that UK Docks shed was taller than permitted.
Since September, I had discovered 8296/14 with the help of another protestor and been sent a copy of 8296/2 by the Planning Manager himself, both of which had been approved and both showed that the shed was indeed nearly 3m taller than planned.
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I had become aware from the very beginning of our protests in September 2013, that South Tyneside Council had been asking the Gazette, to simply remove references to misleading articles, rather than issue corrections to the misinformation published in them.
Mr Atkinson then resolved his ‘complex matter’ by ducking his responsibilities as a Planning Manager:-
- by overlooking the mismanagement of the original complaint by Mr Cunningham, see FBR 248789 where says the complaint originates from the escalation made on the 14/01/14 and not the original complaint of 10/01/14/;
- by passing the buck, to the Head of Development Services to overwrite with the original Stage 2 with one where he repeats the lie about the height of the shed.
The complex matter and hence the delay was solved by Mr Mansbridge introducing a new complaint at a second stage overwriting Mr Atkinson’s second stage in aswer to:- I’m sorry for the delay. Mr Mansbridge is hoping to get a comprehensive response off to residents by the end of next week.
Mr Mansbridge’ response to the petition and my letter of the 2nd May ‘crossed in the post’ and the letter was very critical of his staff and I added:-
If I had followed the suggestions by these officers there would have been no admission by the planning office that the slipway shed on River Drive had not been built to plan and it ill behoves you to refer my email to the formal complaints procedure as well.
As you have seen, the officers to whom I referred were Mr P Cunningham and Mr G Atkinson and the reason we raised the Petition was because the Council had agreed after 5 months of prevarication that we were correct about the shed being taller than planned. It was why we held a meeting in the South Shields Sailing Club in March 2014 and why a petition was raised.
When one sees the response to the petition, they will see that the Council had reverted to the view, held by their Principal Planning Officer in November 2013 and like me one should question the basic assumption in the response to the petition, that approved dimensions of the steelwork are 15.5m at the road end, which I did on the 9th May. I had approximated the height difference to 3m:-
This is not true, there is no supporting documentation which says that the approved height is 15.5m at the River Drive end. All indications are that the approved height is 12.5m which one can get from scaling the portal details in the Drawing 8296/14.
For nearly three months the Council had forced UK Docks to close the slipway off River Drive then for the following four months they had not only allowed them to use it, they had allowed work to continue to work on the shed, including the installation of an overhead crane.
I mention the overhead crane because none of the plans or drawings in existence, make for its provision and the only change to any the plans the plans or drawings since 1996, was made in August 2013, and that did not include any heightening of the shed. The turning point appears to have been the two meetings held on 25th November 2013 where the Executive of the Tyne Gateway Assn and the Principal Planning Officer joined forces to maintain the fraud about the shed’s height.
The main thing to notice about Mr Mansbridge’ acknowledgement of my letter is not whether the date should be the 8th or 9th of May but that a new complaint was introduced at a Second Stage which begs the question, ‘where is stage 1 for 253539?’
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The simple answer is there isn’t one as there was no escalation needed from the second stage of 248789 when we decided to raise the Petition following the admission about the shed’s height in February 2014.
The complexity that Mr Atkinson spoke of in March arose because he had chosen to embellish the misrepresentation about the shed’s height rather than to stop the progress on the shed in January 2014. The Council had the Management of UK Docks over a barrel for the initial fraudulent misrepresentation about the shed that was in circulation in September 2013 but that was compromised by the action taken within days of the meetings of November the 25th when UK Docks were allowed to restart work on their shed.
It was further compromised when Mr Atkinson removed the first stage response made by Mr Cunningham on the 13th January 2014 from FBR 248789 and even further compromised by Mr Mansbridge’ response to our Petition in May 2014.
His way out of the mess created by his planning officers was to prepare the way for the misrepresentation about the shed’s height to be presented to the Ombudsman and that was done on the 2nd June 2014 but in doing so had to repeat the fraudulent misrepresentation made in his response to the petition:-
The approved dimensions that I state are those which are annotated on drawing number 8296/1A which was submitted to the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation on 11 April 1996 etc.
8296/1A may have been submitted to the Development Corporation but it was never approved by them because it contained an error as explained on the page 4 of this letter and in much detail in Shed and Corruption, Part 10. Part 10 goes on to relate how a succession of Council Officers conspired to hide the truth about about the shed’s height and finishes with the then estranged husband of the MP for South Shields, Mr S Buck.
The current Chief Executive was advised of this on the 30th December 2021 but he seems content to do nothing about it. In far less detail the officer who was to become Mr Tew’s Corporate Lead, Legal Governance and Deputy Monitoring Officer, Mr Rumney, had been similarly advised on the 14th and 30th April 2021 but ensured that the truth about the shed would remain hidden by recruiting Ms P Abbott to the inner circle of corruption when she was instructed to misuse Section 7 of the Complaints Policy 2019 v 1.5.
On July 19th 2019 I had written to whom I thought was the Head of Legal Services, Mr M Harding in great detail about the misinformation given by a South Tyneside Council solicitor:-
Dear Mr Harding and Everybody,
Please see attached signed letter. It should be self explanatory. I knew from complaining about 71 Greens Place that the Council were misusing their complaints procedure and using the Ombudsman as a hidden fourth stage of it to hide malpractice, bad planning decisions etc. and it was clear from the start that that they were going to do the same thing with UK Docks shed. If the Planning Officer who measured the shed had any evidence to support his view that the shed was approved we would have seen it long before we even considered resurrecting the Tyne Gateway Assn and certainly before the charade of the Town Hall meeting in November 2013. It should of dawned on me before Alison's email of 9-Dec-15 that they would use the Ombudsman's findings to misinform other Residents, Councillors, MPs, Newspapers etc. but there you go, one does not expect people to lie to the Ombudsman. Regards,
Michael Dawson
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One will notice that the letter attached, is now unsigned and the address is incomplete but let me assure you that the original letter, sent in good faith, was signed and a copy is available. I received an out of office reply from both Mr Harding and another planning officer, Mr G Simmonette, who was also party to the fraud UK Docks’ shed was not taller than permitted.
What I was not aware of was, that between the December ‘18 and June ‘19, Mr Harding had been replaced by Mr J Rumney who had began to describe complaints as vexatious in February 2019.
Mr Swales’ Corporate Lead, Mrs Haley Johnson was persuaded to misapply Section F of the previous Staff Code so that that he did not have to answer the question about why his staff were giving misinformation to the Ombudsman and Paula Abbott was persuaded by Alison Hoy to misapply the updated version in 2021 so that Mr Rumney did not have to answer similar questions to those asked of Mr Swales some five years before.
There are many unanswered questions arising over the years and the most recent being, who asked the Gazette to put back the date of the meeting about vexatious complaints from February 2019 to July 2020.*
This letter began with the lie about the shed’s height given in response to our petition by Mr Mansbridge in 2014 and I’ll finish it with what a Senior Planning Officer told the Ombudsman in 2015:-
34. I have seen the 1996 plans. On plan 1/B the applicant has written the proposed elevations at the inland end as 12.5 metres plus 3 metres. Mr X says the Council should not have taken the applicant’s word for this. The planning authority has to consider what an applicant applies for; it can grant or refuse this but it cannot make an applicant submit something different. This developer applied for a shed 15.5 metres high at the land end. The Tyne and Wear Development Corporation as planning authority approved this. The current Council had to accept this as the approved height.
Plan 1/B was an amendment to 1/A made in 1997 and could never have been approved in 1996. From September 2013 until April 2015 the argument with the Council was about whether UK Docks had permission for their shed and since Ms Hoy’s email of the 9th December 2015** it has been about whether the Council has been giving misinformation/misrepresentation to the Local Government Ombudsman.
Michael Dawson, 22 September 2023
Corrected, 30 October 2023
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PS: I was reminded that a similar Petition to ours about the loss of green space in Holborn was kicked into the long grass in November 2021. It had collected 1000 signatures but it was not until Mr Harlow’s request to give it a rest mate, in April 2023, that I discovered that unlike ours, the Holborn Fields protest concerned a planning application and the Council, over the intervening years had changed the rules, so they could completely ignore it and they did.
** “This matter has been investigated fully by the Council through its corporate complaints procedure. The complaint was not upheld and was also considered and decided by the Local Government Ombudsman who found no fault with the Council's decision.” - by the LGO maintaining the lie that the landward end of the UK Docks’ enclosure had an approved height of 15.5m when it had been shown to be 12.7m since 28th January 2014.