Welcome to this seminar, which
forms part of a series organised by the Traveller Movement to address racial
justice issues faced by Gypsies, Travellers and Roma
In May last year we discussed Gypsies and Travellers in the media,
and a key finding of that seminar was the impact of accommodation and
planning issues on media coverage of Gypsies and Travellers at the local and
national level.
Four out of the five speakers referred to accommodation issues in the
context of negative and damaging media coverage.
So today we’re addressing a root cause of media hostility, and hence of
hostility by the public: the inequality and discrimination these communities
experience in accessing suitable accommodation.
Where then do we stand at the end of a five year
Parliament? What has been done as regards Traveller sites over that period, and
what we might like to see happen under a
new Government after the election.
The total number of Traveller caravans has crept up
in the five years to July 2014 by just under 4%, probably not enough to keep
pace with growth in the population. The number of rented and Traveller-owned
caravans both increased, but so did the number on unauthorised sites, the main
cause of friction with the settled population. The number of caravans on
socially rented sites actually declined by 4.6%, making it all the more
essential that Travellers should be facilitated in providing accommodation for
themselves.
They did make every effort to acquire land and
develop sites, but came up against a brick wall of opposition locally,
reinforced by Eric Pickles’ strategy of wholesale
recovery of planning appeals and then sitting on them indefinitely, This has
now been declared unlawful and discriminatory as a breach of the European
Convention on Human Rights by the High Court.
But the damage has been done; only 100 more pitches got permanent
planning permission over the whole period of this Parliament.
So the current declared policy of requiring local
authorities to grant planning permission for enough sites to accommodate their
Traveller population for the next five years, measured by assessment of local needs, has failed.
In the few cases where a local authority does get to
the next stage of the policy, which is to identify areas of land on which the
planning permissions would be granted, again it doesn’t work, because there is
always a hurricane of opposition from local residents which panics the council
into backing off and dropping the proposal.
We shall also discuss Pickles’ other unlawful policy
of defining Travellers out of existence, which fortunately needs primary
legislation and therefore cant’t happen in this Parliament. Travellers are an
internationally recognised ethnic group and if Pickles’ successor does continue
down that route after the election, the UK would be violating several
conventions to which it is a party.
The Government dud establish a ministerial working
group on tackling inequalities experienced by Gypsies and Traveller, and in the
foreword to their ‘progress report’ in 2008 Andrew Stunell MP said that
Ministers were ‘very concerned that
Gypsies and Travellers are being held back by some of the worst outcomes
of any group across a wide range of social indicators’. Fundamental to the disadvantage
experienced by caravan-dwelling Travellers
in education and in health outcomes is the insecurity of tenure that so many of
them have to endure. The working group allocated money to provide 750 new and
improved pitches, but the number of socially rented pitches has fallen over the
lifetime of the Coalition. The Working Group quietly abandoned the job in April
2012, without mentioning they were going to make it easier for local
authorities to harry Travellers across the landscape when there was no place
they could lawfully settle.
The real problem with the Government strategy is
that where a local authority ignores it, there is no means of enforcement, In
the 1968 Act, the Government was given the power to direct a local authority to
provide sites for such numbers of caravans as he should specify, and the Bill I
introduced in 2012 gave the Secretary of State
an equivalent power to direct a local authority to grant planning
permissions for a given number of caravans.
With the 1968 Act it wasn’t necessary to use the power, but its presence
in the law was enough to galvanise backsliders into compliance.
Finally we need to consider how a different
coalition after May could get round the obstacle. At a Traveller Movement meeting last November I drew attention to the Government approval of plans for a 15,000
home new town at Ebbsfleet as the first of a new generation of ‘garden cities’
to solve the housing crisis, particularly in London and the Southeast. Now
there are plans for 13,000 new homes at Bicester; Ashford and Oxford have
expressed interest in the concept, and particularly interesting, the Homes and
Communities Agency will develop and act as planning authority for 10,000 homes
at Northstowe. The HCA is aware of the
needs of homeless Travellers and is sympathetic to them. But more generally, we
could build into the statutes of the development corporations of these new
towns an obligation to provide say 1% of the homes in the form of caravan sites
for Travellers, producing 80 new pitches.
I broached this with the chairman designate of the
Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, Michael Cassidy and he said he would
consider it. Ebbsfleet will have planning powers, and could incorporate
Traveller sites into the social housing it will be providing in its business
plan, helping to meet the unmet need in neighbouring authorities.
I also spoke to Paul Kitson, Project Manager for the
new town of Northstowe in South Cambridgeshire at the Homes and Communities
Agency, who was sympathetic about including Gypsy sites in their planning.
So lets ask the Government what contribution they
expect the development of new towns to make towards meeting the needs of
Travellers in their areas, and how they will ensure that each of them fit a
proportionate number of pitches into their business plans.
David Rudlin the urban designer who won the £250,00
Wolfson Economics prize last September argues that we must
“take a confident bite out of the green belt”
and build new garden city extensions to around
40 existing provincial cities and towns, including Oxford, Taunton, Ipswich and
Carlisle. The Government have picked up the idea but have only listed five of
the 40 candidates, perhaps because of
fear that the Council for Preservation of Rural England against them on the eve
of the election. But this is the only new idea on the table for dealing with
the acute housing crisis we face with cross-party support, and we must start a
campaign to ensure that Travellers accommodation is an integral part of the
national policy.
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