Bill Grant
Main Page: Bill Grant (Conservative - Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock)(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Bill Grant (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I will bring a slightly different dimension to this debate. I have friends among the Traveller community, and perhaps they can be called “settled Travellers,” because some of them are very successful business people and so on. They live in my community and they are my constituents.
I was a councillor for 10 years in south Ayrshire, which is in the south-west of Scotland. Annually, we have Irish Travellers—they are primarily Irish, but not exclusively—and they have brought some difficulties and challenges to settled communities. The council has a Traveller liaison officer who assists Travellers, for example with education and cleansing, and we also assist them through the local NHS, but they still bring difficulties to our communities.
These people can be very aggressive sales people when somebody wants their gutters cleaned, or they can put pressure on people to have roof repairs, UPVC cladding replacement or tree pruning, for example. There is evidence to suggest that their prices can be quite high and the quality of work can be poor. Also, the people who are generally targeted are mature people living on their own, or elderly couples who worry about certain things. Another consequence of the transient movement of these people is that they take work away from genuine, bona fide, self-employed people. They conduct that work and put little or nothing back into the community. That is slightly off the subject of the debate, but it is all part of the package.
I have great friends who are settled Travellers. I think even Billy Butlin was a travelling person, and he ran a successful business across the United Kingdom—he had a Butlin’s camp at Ayr. So these people bring wealth and quality to the communities, but there are groups of Irish Travellers—they are in the minority, as has often been said—that bring challenges to the settled community.
There is a real perception that there are rules for some people but not for others. When they pitch up at a pay-and-display car park, they neither pay nor display, and they can sit there for four or five days. Sadly, they bring grief with them. I wish we could find a way to bring the Travelling community, who I have a great deal of respect for, and the settled community together.
Our local authority looked at 111 possible sites over a 10-year period, with assistance from the Scottish Government, who recognised the problem and offered funds to support us, but it is not easy to find a site that suits the Traveller community, who may wish to go to certain places. We also have a transient camp, but even if it has vacancies we cannot force them to go there; if they do not want to go, they will not.
I wish the participants in the debate well and I wish my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) well in taking this matter forward. There has to be a solution to suit both parties.