Gypsy and Traveller Policy

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Riordan —[Interruption.]

[Mrs Linda Riordan (in the Chair)]

Order. There is a problem with the sound recording equipment. Without a recording of the proceedings, no Official Report can be produced, so I am suspending the sitting until the problem has been resolved.

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On resuming—

[Andrew Selous]

I ask all who speak in this important debate to do so in a calm and measured way as we discuss sensitive issues concerning our fellow citizens.

A separate planning system for Gypsies and Travellers has been developed in this country since part II of the Caravan Sites Act 1968 was enacted. That part was repealed by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, but the Human Rights Act 1998 and section 225 of the Housing Act 2004 recreated a parallel planning system for Gypsies and Travellers. I have no doubt that that was done with the best of intentions, but it is no longer appropriate for the settled or Traveller communities. Many local councillors share that view.

We know from the 2011 census that 76%—more than three quarters—of Gypsies and Travellers live in houses, bungalows or flats, while only 24%—less than a quarter—live in caravans or mobile homes. Thus, the existing separate planning law for Gypsies and Travellers applies only to less than a quarter of their population in the United Kingdom. I cannot think of any other group in the UK, whether vulnerable or not, that we seek to ghettoise in such a way. We must look at whether such separation in the planning system has worked for the benefit of Gypsies and Travellers; I think that the evidence suggests that it has not.

At 47%, Gypsies and Travellers have the lowest level of work of any ethnicity. The comparable figure for the English and Welsh population is 63%. Of Gypsy and Traveller adults, 60% have no qualifications, whereas the corresponding figure for the rest of the nation is 23%. A compassionate case can be made for integrating Gypsies and Travellers into one assessment of housing need in every local authority. If it is necessary to provide places to park for travelling caravans and some fields for grazing horses belonging to Gypsies and Travellers to bring about one cohesive planning system for the whole population, I believe that that should be done.

When I look at Polish residents in my constituency, I note that they have an active social centre and, indeed, their own Polish Catholic church, both of which are close to my constituency office. We do not have a separate planning system for Poles, allowing them to live together with planning rights not available to the rest of the population, but they have managed to maintain their identity and cultural heritage by meeting together regularly.

I see no reason why there should be any loss of Gypsy or Traveller identity from what I am proposing. To achieve what I am proposing, I am calling on the Minister to introduce primary legislation in the forthcoming Queen’s Speech to amend section 225 of the Housing Act 2004, which requires a separate housing needs assessment for Travellers and Gypsies. I am also calling for the Human Rights Act 1998 to be similarly amended as well as, if necessary, those sections of the Equality Act 2010 that apply to Gypsies and Travellers.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. I do not disagree with him about a single planning policy; we should not differentiate Travellers, or any other ethnic group. However, does he agree that it is important that, wherever it settles, the Traveller community should abide by the rules of the local community? We have had serious problems with the condition of sites in Northern Ireland. That issue must be dealt with as well.

[Andrew Selous]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. We are all equal under, and have a duty to obey, the law.

The current twin-track, separated planning system—one for Gypsies and Travellers and one for settled residents—greatly threatens and undermines community cohesion and causes significant fear, distrust and upset to both Travellers and settled residents. If someone can demonstrate, or simply declare, that they are a Gypsy or Traveller, they acquire highly lucrative planning rights not available to the rest of the population. Such rights are granted to some individuals who are very wealthy, or become so as a result; they are not all vulnerable individuals. That opens up the system to massive abuse from some people seeking to gain such lucrative planning rights.

Many able-bodied Travellers do not in fact travel for a living. Often, settled residents travel more, on business, than some so-called Travellers.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Is there not another point, which is certainly true in the case of Sussex police? If someone claims to be a Traveller, the police simply accept that as fact. No effort is undertaken to ascertain whether they really are of that ethnic identity.

[Andrew Selous]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The reality is that anyone can self-declare as a Traveller. I very much welcomed the written ministerial statement made by the Minister on 17 January in which he committed to looking at that issue.

I cannot believe that it is right that some schools, such as that in the village of Braybrooke in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), should be entirely occupied by Traveller children. I do not believe that that is in their own best interests, not least given Traveller children’s high rates of absence. For Irish-heritage Travellers, the 2008 national pupil database showed primary school absence rates of more than 24% and secondary school absence rates of more than 27%. I believe that if the children of Travellers were integrated across a greater number of schools, they would be more likely to conform to the higher attendance rates of the majority.

The current separate planning system for Gypsies and Travellers often takes no account of the proper provision of facilities in rural locations, specifically those for sewerage and sanitation. Harm is often caused to the local environment by hedgerows being illegally pulled out, pollution of the local water courses and farmland, and sometimes encroachment on others’ land.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an interesting case. In view of the difficulties he is describing, does he accept that a lot of problems have been caused over the decades by a severe shortage of both permanent and transit Gypsy and Traveller sites around the country as a whole? If that shortage was addressed, we would not be having to deal with all the problems he has described.

[Andrew Selous]

I would welcome a proper analysis of how many transit sites we actually need. Many of my constituents have said to me that they in the settled community travel more, for business, than many Travellers. I am proposing a single, compassionate, overall housing needs assessment for everyone—everyone in this country needs housing. I would also point out that more than three quarters of Travellers already live in bricks and mortar houses, and that I would not take away their right to own caravans.

Many villages in my constituency, such as Billington, Stanbridge, Tilsworth, and Heath and Reach, feel very threatened by the large number of Travellers and Gypsies being sited in their communities to comply with current Government requirements. Specifically, the current requirement to accommodate a growth in the Gypsy and Traveller household net formation of 3% every year is causing massive problems. Although I would like to scrap the whole system, it is imperative that while it continues a more accurate figure is used, which I believe would be nearer 1.5%. I also believe that the Pat Niner review that called for a 3% figure was based on the arrival of large numbers of Travellers from Ireland after the Irish Government changed the law. The Irish Planning and Development Act 2000 made development without planning permission a criminal offence.

After that, in 2002, Irish law changed again to make trespass a criminal offence in certain circumstances, which I believe caused numerous Irish Travellers to come over to England and Wales, resulting in a spike in the numbers that led to the 3% figure that is causing problems at the moment.

The current law penalises authorities that have made significant Traveller provision, such as my own, Central Bedfordshire council, which had 197 pitches in November 2013. In addition, almost 60% of the total 247 pitches and plots listed in the Gypsy and Traveller local plan are within four miles of the village of Stanbridge, contradicting the Secretary of State’s statement on 25 November 2013 that Traveller sites should not dominate villages.

Large pitch numbers tend to produce large further needs assessments, leading to ever-increasing pitch requirements. The travellers on the unauthorised Mile Tree Farm site in my constituency are from Aylesbury, I believe, yet are counted against Central Bedfordshire’s needs assessment. That is wrong and unfair, as are the enormous legal costs that council tax payers must bear when local authorities challenge the unfair system.

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is sometimes not only local councils but local communities that bear enormous legal costs? In one case in my constituency, an applicant at a planning appeal has sought costs against local residents, purely because they had the courage to stand up and speak about what they believed in for their community and their village.

[Andrew Selous]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for putting that point on the record. She highlights the fact that there are many legal disputes. They do not promote community cohesion and are expensive for all concerned, whether individuals or, as often happens, council tax payers through local authorities.

Paragraph 15 of the March 2012 planning policy for Traveller sites seems to blunt the impact of the Minister’s written ministerial statement of 17 January on the green belt; that is another reason why I believe that nothing less than primary legislation will do. I do not believe the current situation is tenable, because central Government are forcing local authorities to take many extremely unpalatable decisions that are causing a great deal of anxiety and anger in rural and urban communities. As I said, that does not aid community cohesion. I believe strongly that we are all equal under the law. That is an important principle, but many of my constituents in the settled community do not believe that equality under the law exists at the moment and feel highly discriminated against.

The education and skills of Traveller children are more likely to increase if they are integrated with children from the settled community over a much wider area, so that they do not dominate any particular school. I also believe that Traveller children and their parents would follow the example of the majority of children and have higher rates of attendance and a greater desire to achieve the qualifications and skills necessary to secure sustained employment.

I repeat my request to the Minister to introduce primary legislation to deal with the situation in the forthcoming Queen’s Speech and, in the interim, immediately to lower the 3% net household formation annual growth requirement for Gypsies and Travellers to around 1.5%, as I do not believe that the evidence supports the 3% figure and it is causing huge difficulty to local authorities and our constituents.

[Mrs Linda Riordan (in the Chair)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on keeping his speech short and relevant. Hopefully, we will fit in all Members who wish to speak.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Brandon Lewis)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Riordan. I join others in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) on securing this important debate about the general Gypsy and Traveller policy. It has been a high-quality, reasoned debate with many excellent contributions and suggestions.

I want to make it absolutely clear that, as hon. Members have said, Gypsies and Travellers are as much members of our communities as anyone else and deserve the same protection and the same rights. The key word is “same”. It has been suggested that there may be one law for settled communities and a separate law for Travellers, but we need to ensure that everybody is treated equally.

I gently suggest to the hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) that it is difficult for this Government to take lessons from the previous Labour Government, who left us with the farce of Dale farm, which was mainly down to top-down, regional strategy approaches; she tempts me to return to those by taking a centralist approach to assessing what people are doing. We will certainly not do that.

That leads me directly to the comment of my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire about the 3% growth rate in Gypsy and Traveller household net formation. He believes the figure to be closer to 1.5% and will know from his research that the 3% figure originates in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s 2003 report “Local Authority Gypsy/Traveller Sites in England”, which was probably written with the same pens that we still have many thousands of, paid for with taxpayers’ money back then. The figure was restated in the Department for Communities and Local Government’s 2007 report “Preparing Regional Spatial Strategy reviews on Gypsies and Travellers by regional planning bodies”. My hon. Friend makes a fair point, so, bearing in mind that we have moved away from regional spatial strategies, I will go away and examine whether we can reassess the guidance.

We want fair play in the planning system. We are committed to encouraging sustainable development, and it is important that local authorities plan for the needs of all in their communities, including Travellers. We should not, however, tolerate any abuse of the planning system. We have introduced a broad package of measures to ensure a fair deal for both Travellers and the settled community. Members have raised the different things that have happened in various areas and more work needs to be done to encourage councils and the police to use the powers that they already have. Good examples exist of where the police are now using the considerable powers that we have given them.

We have replaced the top-down planning policy with a new planning policy for Traveller sites, putting the provision of sites back into local authorities’ hands, in consultation with their communities. We abolished the undemocratic regional strategies and the top-down housing and Traveller pitch targets that they contained. We have limited opportunities for retrospective planning applications in relation to any form of development through the Localism Act 2011. We have provided stronger enforcement powers for local authorities to tackle breaches of planning control.

In addition, we have reminded council leaders of the strong powers already available to them to deal swiftly with illegal and unauthorised encampments. We are encouraging authorised site provision, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) mentioned in relation to Adur, with £60 million-worth of Traveller pitch funding on top of the new homes bonus, which applies to Traveller sites as it does to conventional housing. We have given residents of authorised local authority sites improved protection against eviction by applying the Mobile Homes Act 2013 to those sites. We have also set up a cross-Government, ministerial-level working group to address the inequalities experienced by Gypsies and Travellers, particularly in health and education.

[Andrew Selous]

Does the Minister have any sympathy with my point about it not being helpful to have a large concentration of people among whom joblessness is high, skills training is low and rates of absence are high? That could become the norm for that group, and if we really want to do the best for this community, I ask him to consider the matter.

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend makes a good point about ensuring that communities are mixed and balanced, and I encourage local authorities to be aware of that in their planning work.

We also revoked the legislation that limited the use of temporary stop notices against caravans used as a person’s main residence, which might well have stopped the farce at Dale farm that developed under the previous Government. We removed unnecessary national regulation and now allow local authorities to make their own decisions about temporary stop notices.

Our policy aims to increase the number of Traveller sites in appropriate locations. It seeks to address under-provision and to maintain an appropriate level of supply, which may help to reduce unauthorised sites. Our planning policy aligns more generally with that for standard housing. It expects local authorities to plan to meet their Traveller needs based on robust evidence developed locally and to identify and update their supply of specific sites.

Our policy strengthens protection of the green belt and the open countryside by making clear that Traveller sites are inappropriate for green-belt development and that local authorities should strictly limit the development of new Traveller sites in the open countryside. My hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) made a point about the balance between unmet need and the green belt. I am concerned that decision makers do not always afford the green belt and other areas special to us the level of protection that our policies seek to deliver, and I see that concern in the correspondence that I receive and in this morning’s comments. That is why I announced to the House in July last year that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government considers that the single issue of unmet demand—whether for Traveller sites or for conventional housing—is unlikely to outweigh harm to the green belt and elsewhere and to constitute the exceptional circumstances that justify inappropriate development in the green belt.

I also announced that the Secretary of State would recover for decision himself a number of appeals against the refusal of planning permission in order to test the relevant policies at national level. Earlier this month, I announced that those recoveries would continue and re-emphasised our policy position on unmet need and the green belt. I hope that that provides some comfort to hon. Members.

[Andrew Selous]

May I ask the Minister and his officials to re-examine paragraph 15 on page 5 of the “Planning policy for traveller sites” document? Although I welcome what he and the Secretary of State have said, I am concerned that the wording of paragraph 15 runs against what the Minister has just stated.

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend highlights why it is important that we are calling cases in to make the Government’s position clear and to test the policy, but I will consider that specific issue.

My hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) will understand that I cannot comment on particular cases due to the quasi-judicial planning issues, but her point about persistent applications was well made. I enjoyed my visit to her constituency last week, and I am sure that the residents of Little Braxted will be looking forward to its afternoon outing on ITV’s “Britain’s Best Bakery” this week.

My hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms) made reference to a meeting that we had and an idea that was put forward. We will be examining how we can take further that proposal, which may help to alleviate the problems that arise when things move back and forth in a small area.

My hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) always tempts me into new ways of dealing with issues, but I will deal with his suggestions when we come to consider his private Member’s Bill.

We want to ensure fairness in the system, and I stress that we announced our intention to consult later this year on whether the planning definition of Travellers should refer only to those who actually travel and have a mobile or transitory lifestyle. If someone has ceased to travel, it is right to ask whether they should be treated as a Traveller for planning purposes, and we will be seeking answers to that question. In the meantime, however, I am keen to hear the views of hon. Friends, Opposition Members and others.

I am keen to hear views on how planning policy for Travellers could be further refined to ensure that the green belt and other areas that we value are given proper protection. This debate has provided a welcome opportunity to pursue that discussion, but I hope that it will develop in due course. We have undertaken a range of things to ensure that councils have the powers that they need to deal with illegal encampments swiftly. We published some guidance last summer, and I am happy to provide copies of it to interested Members.

In conclusion, I stress that our planning reforms seek to achieve three things: an adequate supply of authorised sites to meet Traveller needs; a level playing field for all; and the protection of our natural heritage and open spaces. We are determined to ensure that everyone has the ability and aspiration to prosper and that we break down the barriers to social mobility through a planning system that is fair and equal to all.