2nd Anniversary of the Shelter
Not only is it two years since the frames went up it is also 18 months since the Planning Manager admitted that the shelter was not built to an authorised plan and some residents living nearby held a meeting to decide what to do about it.
We did two things, we raised a Petition complaining about Council’s handling of the slipway development and I wrote to the Planning Manager on behalf of them asking him that there “be an immediate cessation of work on the Slipway Shed until such time as appropriate community consultation with the relevant council departments could be arranged”.
The Head of Development Services wrote, in response to the Petition, that while the shelter was indeed built without planning permission it was only a meter too wide and he need not take any action against UK Docks. At the same time he claimed that the shelter was as planned with regard to the height and used a drawing that was not authorised to make his point. What he did not tell the people circulated by his response was that the same drawing could be used to show that the planned height was in fact 3m lower than what you see today.
The Head of Development Services also wrote to me a month later repeating the argument about the height of the shelter and said, that the drawing that I had used to convince the Planning Manager to make his admission, was not to scale. The was no mention in this letter of his decision to allow the shelter to be built without planning permission.
I think this could happen because, between the two letters, he asked his staff to raise a new complaint on my behalf. This effectively wiped out the history of my complaint from January to the end of May and it took me another six months to get an unequivocal admission from Customer Advocacy that the Shelter was built without planning permission.
The new complaint was raised on receipt of a letter from me about his staff manipulating the Complaints Procedure to their own advantage. In this, he avoided the uncomfortable task of investigating my claim about his staff. He could also decide what was chosen for discussion in subsequent Stages of Complaint and this includes any referral to the Local Government Inspector for the Ombudsman.
It appears that the second strand of the complaint was used to convince the Local Government Inspector for the Ombudsman to find for the Council. There was no mention of the height of the shelter nor any suggestion that the Investigator was aware that the shelter had been built without planning permission in the first copy of the Ombudsman’s Draft Decision.
Meanwhile, I am awaiting the response of the Chief Executive to give his views on the unplanned ‘Boat Shed’ on the Banks of the Tyne to my MP before I continue with my fight against the Council in allowing its construction.