Unauthorised Encampments
Debate between Andrew Selous and Laura Pidcock(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Andrew Selous
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Of course there are children in settled communities who do not stay on, but she will understand that a large preponderance of Traveller children are regularly on the road. It is difficult for them to be in school regularly, and the quality of home education, if it exists at all—
Andrew Selous
No, I will not take any more interventions, because other people want to speak.
As someone who believes passionately that every single community, including the Gypsy and Traveller communities, should have the life chances available to all children in this country, I think that we need to do better than that. The race disparity audit is a wake-up call. Many aspects of our planning and education system do not work for Traveller children, and we need to take that seriously.
I believe in the melting pot view of society. I believe that if we all live alongside each other, by and large, we can get along well together and have good community cohesion. A small story: two gentlemen came to see me at my surgery a couple of weeks ago about some local authority repairs that had not been done. I dealt with the gentleman who had a case, and took it up with the local authority. It turned out that he was a Traveller, in his 60s, who was unable to read or write, and his neighbour, who was not a Traveller but a member of the settled community, had come along to help him.
Is that not a lovely story? That is the sort of Britain that we want: people from different communities coming together to help each other. If that gentleman had lived on one of the private sites in my constituency, sadly, it is unlikely that he would have had a friend in the settled community who could have come along to assist him with his case. There are serious questions about the separation of Travellers, and I would like the Government to reveal more about the race disparity audit, and how the majority of Travellers who live among the settled community compare with those who live on separate Traveller sites. That would help the issue.
Sadly, many privately owned Traveller sites in my constituency are ungoverned space. The local authority cannot gain access without a warrant at times, and vulnerable tenants sub-letting caravans send me hair-raising stories, even today, about being intimidated in the middle of the night and so on. That is not good enough. There have been instances of modern slavery. I worry about those vulnerable people sub-letting on traveller sites. Modern slavery is occurring, and the police and the council cannot get to them to protect them properly in the way that all of us would like them to be.