Unauthorised Encampments

Amanda Milling Excerpts

Thursday 12th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered unauthorised encampments.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and to lead today’s debate following Monday’s well-attended debate in the main Chamber. I thank hon. Members for attending. I know that we are always balancing constituency pressures with the pressures of being in Westminster, so it is good to see colleagues from around the country, not just my own west midlands region, and from all sides of the House.

On Monday, we heard stories from across the House of how unauthorised encampments bring chaos to local communities and blight our green and open spaces. It is the impact on our communities that I will touch on, because that was the driver for my calling for the debate. However, on Monday we also touched on some other important Traveller issues relating to education, modern slavery and health inequalities. Those are equally important, and I think we all agreed that they must be considered as well. I also mention that the vast majority of Travellers live alongside our settled community in absolute harmony. I am talking about the minority: a small group who are making the lives of my local communities challenging.

I will focus on unauthorised encampments, how they affect local communities and blight our open spaces, how we can seek to prevent them and consider the process for evicting Travellers from these sites, and how we can come up with a new solution for what seems to be an ever-present situation. Before I begin in earnest, I thank the Minister for the contribution he made to Monday’s debate. I know that he, like many of us here, has first-hand experience of the issue, and I welcome his announcement of a call for evidence to address the way that this issue is dealt with. I assure him that, if appropriate, I will make a submission to his Department’s consultation, and will encourage my constituents to do so.

First, I will touch on some of the background to the problem in my own constituency of Aldridge-Brownhills, and one or two statistics. I think we like statistics in this place. There were 22,004 Traveller caravans in England in January 2017, of which 2,860, representing 13%, were parked on unauthorised encampments. That might not seem high to some, but, as many of us here know, the effect on a local community when a large encampment arrives can be massive. In my constituency it is not uncommon for these encampments to have more than 50 caravans plus vehicles.

Many of those vehicles are luxury caravans and vehicles, which my hard-working residents could only dream of affording. Up to 26 September this year, there were 68 unauthorised encampments in the borough of Walsall alone. The estimated cost associated with those set up on council land was about £200,000, and there are costs associated with encampments that arrive on private land and, sometimes, on housing association land as well. That money could and should be going back into our communities and into the services that we all value and want to see strengthened.

The problem is not a new one for the borough of Walsall, nor is it just a problem for my constituency within the Walsall borough; it also affects the constituencies of my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) and of the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz). The issue has been ongoing for the last few summers, but this year things have come to a head. I believe that the local authorities try to act, but most of the time their actions are not quick enough to ensure that members of the settled community are not adversely affected. The Travelling community seem to understand the law and the hoops that the council must jump through before moving an encampment on, and each encampment seems to follow a similar pattern.

[Amanda Milling (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend and neighbour on securing the debate. She rightly talks about the issues facing Walsall; I read about them regularly in the Express and Star, because those issues affect a number of constituencies, including mine. I recognise that local communities are really affected, particularly when we see the Travellers coming on to local parks.

[Wendy Morton]

I absolutely agree, which is why the focus of today is that impact on local communities, local residents, and sometimes local businesses. It is often local community groups that normally use green spaces on a Saturday morning.

I was talking about the process and pattern that often seems to occur. Before it is evicted by a court order, we see the encampment simply move to another site. The Travellers set up camp while the council works on the eviction process, and just before the council serves the necessary order, the encampment packs up and moves on—often down the road to another site in the same borough—only for the same process to repeat itself. That cat-and-mouse merry-go-round comes at great cost to the taxpayer. Enough is enough. It must be brought to an end. It is time to seek some solutions.