Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Bach and Baroness Turner of Camden

Monday 12th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I support these amendments. I do not want to add anything to the very detailed case already made by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, in introducing the amendment. It seems to me that local authorities have an obligation in law to provide sites for Travellers and their failure to do so is responsible for the need to provide legal assistance to Travellers. Otherwise, Traveller families, which include numbers of children, are rendered homeless, and that, in my view, is quite unacceptable. I hope that the detailed amendments before the House tonight meet a sympathetic response from the Government.

[Lord Bach]

My Lords, we agree with the amendments in this group. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said:

“Ministers say that Travellers must obey planning laws like everyone else; but they demolished the system created by the previous Government under which an obligation was imposed on local authorities to provide planning permission for Travellers’ sites that would accommodate the number of Travellers in each area, as determined by an independent assessment of needs, buttressed by public inquiries. Since the Secretary of State gave local authorities carte blanche to rip up those plans and decide in their unaided wisdom”—

that was the phrase he used—

“whether to allocate any land at all in their development plans to Travellers’ sites, the number of sites for which it was intended that planning permission should be granted has plummeted by half, according to research conducted”.—[Official Report, 24/1/12; col. 928.]

In his reply, will the Minister explain to the House why the Government took that decision and changed the policy that had been set up under the previous Government?