S and C: Summary of Parts – previously Part 20

Posted on February 20, 2023 by Mick Dawson

A summary of Parts, 1 to 19 has replaced Part 20 because nothing new had been added to the Shed and Corruption Series  since Part 19.

Shed And Corruption - Part 20
From: mick.dawson@theharbourview.co.uk
Date:  20/02/2023 (16:53:17 GMT)
To:    Emma Lewell-Buck MP
Cc:    Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP, Nicola Robason, Alison Hoy
Attachment: To_ELB_MP_20-Feb-23.pdf was based 9 years of evasion and
misinformation given out by STC. Part 20 is therefore a misnomer and
has been renamed: Sum-Parts-1-19.pdf

When South Tyneside Council could not provide any evidence to back the claim, that UK Docks they had been given approval for their shed, they said that I and other protestors were making allegations.
When the MP and Cllr Hamilton paid a parsonal visit to UK Docks to check this during 2019 they were told that they had been given approval retrospectively which proved to be an outright lie.
To cover-up the discrepancy between the two claims we were told by the Monitoring Officer, 19-Dec-19:- “I understand that all complaints procedures regarding this matter have been exhausted both internally within the Council and externally.

Hi Emma

Please see Part 20 of Shed and Corruption which has been attached. I hope it reads better than some of my earlier efforts.
I thought it was about time I put a summary out before I tackled both South Tyneside and Northumberland Councils for giving away bits of the England Coastal Path to people who live adjacent to it. In view of the difficulties I have had with Mansbridge and Co. I suspect that I might get more achieved than I have done with UK Docks by using Social Media as a weapon. Blame Cllr Purvis for that idea.
I though(t) at first to post this Part on the anniversary of the admission by the Planning Manager that we were correct in our view that their shed was nearly 3m taller than permitted, but realised that Parliament was not sitting on the 13th so I’ll post it tomorrow to the WWW and add all cross references over the next few days. If anything is more like an allegation than a fact, I’ll publish a correction. Hopefully there are none.
I still think that the only way to stop a Council giving misinformation to the Ombudsman is to make it a criminal offence and if you and Anne-Marie, from opposite sides of the House, were to raise the issue I’m sure you would get a good response from most of the other members. Maybe wishful thinking but even the remote threat of jail might make those doing it, think twice about covering-up malpractice by misrepresenting things to the Ombudsman and yes, I have seen Angela’s ‘resignation’ copied to the current Chief Executive, Even a mention of ‘The Seven Principles of Public Life (also known as the Nolan Principles) might improve things.
For some strange reason the police will not consider prosecuting planning officers even though fraudulent misrepresentation is a criminal offence, and UK Docks have become very wealthy since they moved from Tyne Dock so attempting a private prosecution is out of the question.
I notice that I have been accused of scattergunning again though I prefer to say that I am only broadcasting the truth which is why Alison has been copied in. Nicola has been sent a copy because she is the current Monitoring Officer and she should know the original complaint about the Shed was exhausted nine years and 7 days ago.

Cheers
Mick Dawson
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Shed and Corruption – Part 20

Posted on February 20, 2023 by moderator 
Shed And Corruption - Part 20
Date: 20/02/2023 (16:53:17 BST)
From: mick.dawson@theharbourview.co.uk
To: Emma Lewell-Buck MP
Cc: Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP, Nicola Robason, Alison Hoy
Attachment: To_ELB_MP_20-Feb-23.pdf (85 KB)

Hi Emma

Please see Part 20 of Shed and Corruption which has been attached. I hope it reads better than some of my earlier efforts.

I thought it was about time I put a summary out before I tackled both South Tyneside and Northumberland Councils for giving away bits of the England Coastal Path to people who live adjacent to it. In view of the difficulties I have had with Mansbridge and Co. I suspect that I might get more achieved than I have done with UK Docks by using Social Media as a weapon. Blame Cllr Purvis for that idea.

I though at first to post this Part on the anniversary of the admission by the Planning Manager that we were correct in our view that their shed was nearly 3m taller than permitted, but realised that Parliament was not sitting on the 13th so I’ll post it tomorrow to the WWW and add all cross references over the next few days. If anything is more like an allegation than a fact, I’ll publish a correction. Hopefully there are none.

I still think that the only way to stop a Council giving misinformation to the Ombudsman is to make it a criminal offence and if you and Anne-Marie, from opposite sides of the House, were to raise the issue I’m sure you would get a good response from most of the other members.

Maybe wishful thinking but even the remote threat of jail might make those doing it, think twice about covering-up malpractice by misrepresenting things to the Ombudsman and yes, I have seen Angela’s ‘resignation’ copied to the current Chief Executive, Even a mention of ‘The Seven Principles of Public Life (also known as the Nolan Principles) might improve things.

For some strange reason the police will not consider prosecuting planning officers even though fraudulent misrepresentation is a criminal offence, and UK Docks have become very wealthy since they moved from Tyne Dock so attempting a private prosecution is out of the question.

I notice that I have been accused of scattergunning again though I prefer to say that I am only broadcasting the truth which is why Alison has been copied in. Nicola has been sent a copy because she is the current Monitoring Officer and she should know the original complaint about the Shed was exhausted nine years and 7 days ago.

Cheers

Mick Dawson

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Shed and Corruption – Part 19

Posted on January 13, 2023 by moderator 
UKD - Conditions 2 and 5
From: mick.dawson@theharbourview.co.uk
Date: 13/01/2023 (11:03:37 GMT)
To:   Melanie Todd
Cc:   Emma Lewell-Buck MP, Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP,
      Nicola Robason, Alison Hoy
Bcc:  22 
2 Attachments 	UKD-2and5-13-Jan-23.pdf (63 KB)	
		S-and-Corruption-3.pdf (243 KB)

Covering Email, 13th January 2023

Hi Melanie,

Best wishes for the New Year.

When I started, what was going to be a review of Sunday working by UK Docks, I thought I would just ask about whether the shed below had been put to use on a Sunday for the last year or so but it raised so many issues that my review of fifth condition had grown by the end of last week to three pages and finally finished with five so I have sent it as an attachment: UKD-2and5-13-Jan-23. Nearly two weeks now and I’m still not happy because I have missed much out.

The 5th Condition, Sunday Working, did not apply until the shed was complete and that was in June 2014 but the breach of the 2nd occurred as soon as the first two frames were erected and the breach of the 5th in late 2016. There may have been some breaches of the 5th, earlier but I was lodging in Amble at the time and was not a witness to them.

Alison Hoy of Customer Advocacy foiled my attempts to register my complaint about the use of the shed on a Sunday, using slightly different techniques to achieve the same result as Peter Cunningham 3 years earlier. His was simple, he just removed the complaint about the breach of the second condition from the public domain but Alison’s was quite sophisticated by comparison. She converted the breach of the fifth to a complaint about noise knowing that the noise complaints can be easily lost by their Environmental Health Team, and in the case of UK Docks it was with a time-sheet scam.

This has been posted on my blog as Shed and Corruption – 19 and copied to the MP’s and the Monitoring Officer to keep them informed and to Alison, out of courtesy.

Cheers
Mick
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Corrupution in STC spreads to NCC

Posted on December 6, 2022 by moderator 
Covering Email for Contagion of Corruption
 
Dear Nicola,
The owner of the Beacon was granted permission to knock it down 
and replace it with with a block of flats in February 2016 on condition 
that he start work on it within three years. I’d spotted a flaw in the 
plans submitted to the Committee and advised the Council about it 
but it was deliberately withheld so permission was granted.

ST/0746/15/FUL, Discrepancies in Site Plans:- hopefully, the typos etc. have been corrected. *

There was one very obvious flaw in the plans drawn up by the agent for the owner of the Beacon public house on Greens Place in South Shields by GC Architectural Services. The plans were for its demolition and a block of flats to replace it and the flaw concerns the conversion of the former beer cellar into suitable living accommodation.

The two scripts say “Blocked Paved Frontage with Glass Block Light Wells and “Railings 1.2m Maxm High.

The flaw was that the architect had extended the curtilage of the former Beacon to include about a metre of the public path that ran the entire length of the front of the Beacon, and when the Planning Committee approved the plans in February 2016, they gave that piece of common land to a private developer.

A small piece of land but it presented South Tyneside Council with a big problem.

In 2016, the obvious shortcoming of the site plans for the development for 100-101 Greens Place were pointed out to the Council by reference to the most relevant of site plans of which there now 4 to confuse the issue and only one, the third, represents anything like truth. That numbers 100-101 Greens Place  like, 66 to 70, do not include any part of the highway:-

  1. ST074615FUL Site Location 220715.pdf;
  2. ST074615FUL Site Location Plan 220715.pdf;
  3. ST074615FUL Site Location Plan Figure 2 220715.pdf;
  4. ST074615FUL Location Plan 2 Figure 3 220715.pdf.

I discovered when I watched the Planning Committee meeting of 12th January 2016 from the gallery in Jarrow Town Hall that the obvious flaw in Site Location Plan had not been communicated to them.

The second sketch was taken from one the site plans that were made available before the meeting and it clearly shows the curtilage of the public house does not include any of the pavement outlined by the dotted line.

One will see that only the third of the current site plans reflects the situation in 2016 and before we look them in detail, we will examine how the Council refined the process in the intervening years.

The first refinement was to avoid the planning committee altogether and they did this when they gave part of the English Coastal Path to the developer in his conversion of the former Garlands call centre into luxury flats.

* the site plans from page 2 have also been laid out differently to suit the blog as well.

1

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Dissection of Responses: 14-Jan-20 and 26-Feb-20

Posted on November 6, 2022 by moderator

It has taken nearly six months to prove beyond doubt that the emails from this site to the MP for South Shields were deliberately being censored by her former husband or by a Mr K Palmer who had been given the mailbox,  “PALMER, Keith” <palmerk@parliament.uk> By which one will have to remain a mystery until until Mr Simon Buck decides to tell the truth. There is the possibility that Mr Palmer never existed as a real person.*

The Response 14th January.

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Prologue to Shed and Corruption

Posted on October 14, 2022 by moderator

12-October-2022*

In the covering email to a former neighbour, I implied that some of my neighbours were unreliable witnesses and gave some evidence, some of which may be disputed, though I can vouch for the fact the Haigs did tell their solicitors that a party wall agreement was in place when it was not. None of what follows is hearsay, hence all the cross-references.

We had two and a half months to work out that UK Docks claim that their shed was ‘legal’ to mean approved was a nonsense and Haig’s repetition of it to the committee of the TGA on 25th November 2013 was no different from the fraudulent misrepresentation made to the Gazette by a UK Docks representative two and a half months before.
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Commentary on Shed and Corruption – Part 17

Posted on September 21, 2022 by moderator

Email to MP, 20-Jul-22: Shed and Corruption – Part 17: Messrs Buck and Palmer

Attachment: UKD-Slipway-Enclosure.pdf, dated 3-Aug

It became obvious a couple of minutes into the phone call requested by Mr Palmer in January 2020, that it was set up to destabilise the working relationship between the people protesting about the Council’s support for the development of UK Dock’s site on River drive and their MP for South Shields.

It is entirely possible that Mr Palmer, palmerk@parliament.uk. does not exist and when I returned the call to Emma’s South Shields Office on 0191 427 1240, on January 13th 2020, it  was answered by Mr Buck.

On the 21st September I rang the Houses of Parliament on a free phone service and was pleasantly surprised how quick the call was answered and they were able to confirm Mr Palmer’s palmerk@parliament.uk address is the responsibility of the MP’s office rather than the House(s of Parliament).

I have always assumed that my communications with both him and Mr Buck took place without the MP’s knowledge and that little snippet of information rather confirms the possibility that K Palmer never existed and I was actually talking to Mr Buck. I have just checked and both email addresses are still valid, i.e. no rejections and that they have not been closed is because they both hold a copy of the exchange given in the table:-

8th January 2020 Enquiry from Mr Buck
9th January Response from M Dawson
13th January Email to Emma, copy KP, AH, DF and JA
Attach a copy of letter from Solicitor
14th January Email to Emma, copy KP, NR and MH
14th January Misinformation from Mr Buck
23rd January Email to Mr Palmer, copy Cc: ELB MP, Simon Buck, Cllr AH, Cllr DF, Cllr JA, P Cunningham, H Johnson
List of references
24th January Email to Mr Simon Buck copy KP, AH
20th February Email to K Palmer cc ELB, AH, DF, JA, GW, PC, Nicola Robason and Stuart Wright
Attachments: Dishonesty at Town Hall
and Destroying Evidence
24th February Email to SB with evidence of height of shed KP, ELB MP, Cllrs AH, DF, NR, SW, G Mansbridge, H Johnson
8296/2: approved height of landward end =12.7m 
8296/14: approved width=12.2m
26th February From NR, saying procedure is exhausted in and out
26th February From SB who was misapplying the Parliamentary Behaviour Code

Messrs Buck and Palmer

Hopefully this will be the last part in the series, though I fear that whoever is in control of South Tyneside Council are secure in the knowledge that the police will not prosecute them and they have plenty of backers to make civil action prohibitively expensive for anybody to take civil action against them so they can sit behind that protective wall and continue to back UK Docks’ claim that they had approval for their shed.

They did not, and anyone can judge for themselves by looking at the approved drawing from 1996 which gave the height at the frame at the landward end in September 2013 of 12.7m and comparing it with the built height at that section which is 15.5m.
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Critique of Legal Monitoring Officer – 2018

Posted on September 21, 2022 by moderator

Introduction to the Critique

A much simpler version of this critique was published 2 years ago.

The local residents guessed from the first week in September 2013, that UK Docks had built their shed taller than permitted because the planning officer responsible for the structure being erected next to Harbour View, off River Drive in South Shields, just kept repeating that it had been approved and was evasive about its height. In response to a direct question about its height, he sent out plans provided by the owner of the site and referred one of the residents to the Council’s Complaints Procedure. The question was simply:- “Has the revised height of 15.5metres been approved or is it in breach of the 1996 Planning approval?

The first thing to note is that the bottom and left sides are missing from the first drawing and it turns out that it was one of two drawings drawings from the Council’s archive that had been approved. It was numbered 8296/2 and showed the permitted height of the structure to be 12.8m at the landward end.

My partner at the time was sent a copy of the drawings and I took little interest simply because I assumed that if they had gone to the expense of erecting such a large structure in a designated residential area the must have had permission for it but it turns out that they had not.

Because the planning officer kept denying that anything was wrong with the height Tyne Gateway Association (TGA) was resurrected as a means to break out of this deadlock but it failed and this can be attributed to the Chair of the TGA and Cllr Anglin. In simple terms the Councillor had promised the TGA that he would find out for us if the shed had been built with planning permission.

Some of us trusted neither of them and as one of the committee members of the TGA, I made sure that I was in attendance when we met with the Council at the meeting at the Town Hall in November 2013. Our lack of trust was prudent as we were again told that it had been approved.**

Subsequent investigation showed that a) it was not compliant with any approved plans and b) the Planning Officer knew about it before the TGA was even reformed.

Cllr Anglin took no minutes at that meeting but it was recorded in the TGA’s minutes of their meeting in the evening that:- 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.

KH was Ken Haig and he was for a time one of the directors of HB Hydraulics Ltd. He denied any interest in UK Docks. When asked what a director of a navel supply company and his procurement officer who previously had worked for the MOD, the Chair of the TGA, why they were supporting UK Docks, we were simply told that he did not know the owner of the slipway.

The way that South Tyneside Council avoided the truth about the shed’s height is gone into, in some detail, in Shed and Corruption -Part 1/3. The reason the third part had been highlighted is because the former Head of Development Services, Mr G Mansbridge was pivotal in providing misinformation to the Local Government Ombudsman.

While complaints about South Tyneside Council Employees are never considered, I had noticed when the Corporate Lead, Mrs Hayley Johnson misapplied Section F of the Council’s Code of Conduct in 2016 that councillors were not included in that exclusion and raised a complaint against Cllr Anglin in 2017 which has led to this criticism. There was no response to the observations on the Corporate Lead’s misuse of Section F of the Code of Conduct because whoever authorised its misuse leant on Ms Hoy and needless to say South Tyneside Council continue the Section because they have no desire to be honest about the height of the shed.

In January 2017, I had advised Cllr Anglin that the Council were generally calling our complaints, allegations and especially those  about UK Docks, so that they did not to have to respond to them. He never answered, nor did Customer Advocacy but the Council’s Corporate Lead did on the 17th January:- “My letter requested that you refrain from raising historical complaint issues regarding the boat shed or any other matters which had already exhausted the Council’s complaints procedure.

The Council’s complaints procedure will never be exhausted while they support Evasions and Denials by at least one of the following, a rearrangement of the table at the end of Shed and Corruption – Part 2:-

[1] A complaint not recorded, nor questions answered;
[2] Back-pass to a completed step or stage;
[3] Conflation of complaints;
[4] Denial/contradiction in the first response;
[5] Forward pass or diversion into a dead end.

The first and third are mentioned in my email/letter to Cllr Anglin mentioned above which concludes with a polite way of saying the Council was using a corrupt version of the complaints procedure:- “This sort of thing lends weight to our suspicions that the Council’s complaints procedure is being run for the benefit of the Council (the Establishment) and not for the people.

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Shed and Corruption – Part 18

Posted on September 16, 2022 by moderator

I had intended to write to my MP, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, on the Opening of Parliament about UK Docks’ shed in South Shields but events overtook me and it was not sent until September. Those events were well reported so there is no need to mention them here but it meant some delay in my re-examination of malpractice by South Tyneside Council over the previous nine years.

Copy of the letter to Anne-Marie, Heart of S and C sent on September 16th 2022, with minor corrections to grammar etc. plus a subtle change of blame.
Where I had said:-

3. Mr Mansbridge instructed his staff to wind it up before the first stage was complete.

has been modified because it appears that his staff were acting independently when they had been told to hide the fact that the shed was taller than planned so it has been changed to:-

3. Mr Mansbridge’ staff wished to close down the complaint after repeating the lie about the shed’s height.
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Shed and Corruption – Messrs Buck and Palmer

Posted on August 4, 2022 by moderator 
Shed and Corruption - Part 18
From: mick.dawson@theharbourview.co.uk
Date: 04/08/2022 (11:59:17 BST)
To: Melanie Todd
Cc: Emma Lewell-Buck MP, Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP, Monitoring Officer,
Alison Hoy
1 Attachment: UKD Slipway Enclosure.pdf (68 KB)

Hi Melanie,

Please see, UKD Slipway Enclosure. It has recently been posted as Shed and Corruption – Part 18. I first sent Part 17 to Emma privately, before Parliament closed for the Summer recess on June 21st mainly because it concerned her former partner who said he was her Office Manager, who along with his colleague had appeared to have sided with those who had tried to deselect her between the time Johnson and Rees-Mogg attempted to prorogue Parliament and the ‘Get Brexit Done’ election in late 2019.
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