Harbour View

Complaint Initiation 10 January 2014

From: M Dawson > To: planning.enquiries@southtyneside.gov.uk
The first thing to notice is that the complaint was sent to Planning Enquiries not Mr Cunningham. As Principal Planning Officer he would be able to vet all incoming emails re planning. My complaint was removed from the normal complaints procedure.

• I had already shown he had mislead us about the width and the complaint contained evidence that he had also misled us about the planned height.
• The Complaint went down a black hole. Mr Cunningham had effectively binned it by referring back to the meeting, 25-Nov-13, at which he said the the base and height were compliant though ‘legal’ was the term used by one of the Ward Councillors, John Anglin with, reference to the same meeting.
• The Drawings Mr Cunningham used showed both ends of the shed to be 15.5m but given that the gradient of the slipway was 2.7m there should be that difference between them. Only one can be said to represent the planned height of the shed and it is not the road end see 8296/2 retrieved by the Council from their archive.
• I used the Agent’s drawing  8296/14 which had been approved by his manager on October 14th 2013 as it showed a river gable end of 15.6m or 16m depending on the how one scaled it and this gave a road end height of 12.7m.
• Mr Cunningham was then in a bind because he either had to admit that the residents were right all along  about the height or somehow avoid answering this complaint.
• I had also put in writing that the shed was also too wide which we all now know was a material consideration and it was when Mr Cunningham measured it in September. He was now in a double bind because an enforcement notice should have been issued then on either count.
• He should have come clean at the meeting but it looks like  Mr Haig, one of the representatives, made sure that did not happen, from the minutes of a meeting a few hour later: – KH advised that they had seen the plans which were date stamped 1996, the structure is 15.5m. Proper drawings were on file and there is nothing illegal about the structure.
• When he saw the  complaint it was his choice to concede that I was correct but he passed it back to the Chair of the TGA:-

  From: Peter Cunningham
  To: M Dawson
  Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2014 10:19:18
  Subject: FW: Slipway Development - Work Continues [NOT PROTECTIVELY MARKED]
  
  Mr Dawson, I responded to you this morning as follows:
  
  The queries that you raise are not new, indeed I have been repeating my response to them for some time now, and you will recall that I explained the planning aspect of the Council’s position to you regarding this development during our meeting. This meeting included the chair and representatives of your residents group, and Councillors Anglin and McMillan. This meeting was requested by the residents and it was arranged by the Councillors.
  
  My understanding is that the responses that I had provided to you at this meeting enabled the matter to be closed.
  
  May I therefore suggest that you speak with the Chair of the residents group in respect of the points that you have raised below, as these have already been discussed and explained. If you are still not satisfied with the Council’s response then you should use the Council’s complaints procedure which has 3 stages.
  
  Peter Cunningham
  Principal Planning Officer

  1. His responses were evasive because the approved drawings 8296/2 and 14 were evidence that we were right when the other resident and I, with the exception of Chair of the Residents Group claimed that the shed was taller than planned.
  2. To put it bluntly he lied to us about the shed being approved. He said the shed was compliant with a mistake on drawings that were not approved, 8296/1A and 1B.
  3. Instead of considering the complaint he wished to take me back to square 1:- If you are still not satisfied with the Council’s response then you should use the Council’s complaints procedure which has 3 stages. I did not wish to go back, and as he had enclosed a copy of South Tyneside Councils own guidence on complaints that indicated that I should refer the complaint up the management and I did. We are left to guess why Mr Cunningham  did not own up to the fact that the shed was taller than at the meeting when he would have just got a ticking off for incompetence.

• What happened next was that his Manager backed him by reintroducing the initial misrepresentation about the height by using a virtually identical drawing to the one given to Mr Cunningham by UK Docks when they first startrd erecting the frames for the shed. Under the title of approved drawings he said:- 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.
  That was in an email to M Dawson In January 2014, and was a fraudulent misrepreasentation but he

• This lead to Senior Managers ignoring complaints about his staff, another sham meeting and eventually to the Ombudsman being deliberately misinformed. All to maintain the lie that the shed was not nearly 3m too tall.

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