Unauthorised Encampments

Heather Wheeler Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2010 Westminster Hall

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

I am grateful to you, Mrs Brooke, for calling me so early in the debate, and to my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for securing it. It is hugely important to the situation in South Derbyshire. Since February alone, we have had 24 illegal incursions, in a district with authorised sites. That is why it is so galling for the people and voters of South Derbyshire. When we do the right thing, we are taken for mugs. Frankly, we are fed up. We will not put up with it any more, and nor will our voters. I assure the Minister that there will be civil disobedience over the issue.

I am grateful for the strong messages issued by the Department for Communities and Local Government. We have finally won our appeal with the inspectors against illegal encampments and planning permission. It is the first that I have known in all my time in politics in South Derbyshire, which I assure hon. Members is a long time. We have an achievement, so I thank the new Government.

For goodness’ sake, when councils do the right thing and authorise encampments, can we please push forward with eliminating the John Prescott 21-day rule? It requires public authorities to go through a long process of sorting out whether there are human rights implications and goodness knows what else for these people, and it does not apply to anybody in our settled communities. It is complete nonsense.

We have good police action in Derbyshire, where we seek to assist private landowners to go down the 24-hour bailiff route to remove people where—I say this again—vacancies are available on authorised sites. But when the land is owned by the authority, Severn Trent, the Highways Agency or similar, there is still the nonsense of having to do the dance of the John Prescott 21-day rule. Will the Minister assure us as much as he can today, and later in writing, that that rule will be scrapped?

We are delighted by the strong ruling to get rid of the regional spatial strategy and the pitches rule. It assisted enormously when we wrote to the Planning Inspectorate and helped us fight off the latest planning inquiry. That was the first one ever. I wrote the strongest letter I have ever written in my life. The language was not particularly parliamentary, but it got the point through and we won. Will the Minister please carry on with the issue and ensure that it is sorted out? My electorate expect it to happen in the coming Session, and I look to him to see it through.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I will try not to fill the long period that you described between now and the winding-up speeches, Mrs Brooke. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on raising this issue, which I have heard debated four or five times in this Chamber in the past five years or so. That, along with the number of my hon. Friends seeking to speak in the debate, demonstrates what an extremely important issue it is. Indeed, it affects communities across the whole of England, and those hon. Members here today probably represent only a small number of those on both sides of the House who have significant worries about the issue.

My hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) raised the particularly interesting topic of trespass. As far as I can recall, the issue was dealt with quite well in one of the last Acts passed by the previous Conservative Government in 1997, which made some efforts towards putting the point right. Although the legislation no doubt needs improving, the basic machinery is there. With the exception of my hon. Friend, however, all the others who have spoken in the debate have addressed the identical problem of people of one sort or another—I will come back to who they are—illegally occupying a vacant site, of which they have taken ownership, nearly always on a bank holiday Monday. Within a few days, they insert hard standing.

[Heather Wheeler]

The interesting point about trespass is that there is no criminal trespass law on which we can rely in relation to public authority land. We are looking for our new coalition Government to bring forward from our manifesto a new intentional criminal trespass law that will allow us to have the same rights for public authority land as for private authority land. That would be a major development, and I thank my hon. Friend for allowing me to mention it.

[Mr Gray]

My hon. Friend makes a similar point to my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe. Both my hon. Friends are quite right, although their point is not absolutely central to the topic of today’s debate, which is the illegal occupation of land owned by Gypsies, Travellers and others.

As I said, the pattern we see is a similar one, and many people have described it in the debate. People move on to land, often on a bank holiday weekend. Before anybody knows what is happening, hard standing has gone down, toilet blocks have been erected and gardens have been put in. Often, little bungalows—we are not talking about caravans—are established in a very short time, as I have seen in Minety in my constituency. I have eight or 10 illegal Gypsy encampments in my constituency, including at Calcutt park, near Cricklade, and various other places. In a short time, something that looks for all the world like a village has been established. There are wheelie bins at the end of the drive, electricity has been laid on and these people have established something that no one else would be allowed to establish.

I will not bore hon. Members by repeating what a number of my hon. Friends have eloquently described. However, I want to address the reason why such developments are allowed to occur. My hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler) referred to the way in which the noble Lord Prescott—what a noble Lord he is—introduced planning circular 01/06. Hon. Members will recall that the circular told planning inspectors that where local authorities are not able to demonstrate that there is adequate provision for Gypsies and Travellers elsewhere in their area, there should be a presumption in favour of illegal Gypsy and Traveller encampments. That has meant—I have had several such cases in my constituency—that where the planning inspector sits on an appeal, the law requires him to say that unless the local authority can demonstrate that there is adequate provision elsewhere, he must give the Gypsies and Travellers permission for their illegal encampment. I do not blame the inspectors; they have no other option but to do that, because that is what the single planning note requires them to do.

Leaving aside the two-tier planning system that such an arrangement implies—I will come back to that in a second—there are several specific problems associated with the circular. First, it does not stipulate who Gypsies and Travellers are. No distinction is made under law between hippies, new age travellers, people who are homeless, traditional Romanies, of whom there are many in my constituency, Irish Travellers, Roma and people coming in from France. Indeed, the French Government recently expelled a large number of Roma, and there is nothing to prevent them from coming here and declaring themselves to be Gypsies or Travellers. There is therefore no definition in the law to distinguish between those people.

As another speaker mentioned a moment ago, when the Gypsy and Traveller assessments were made under the regional spatial strategy—I am glad that that document is now defunct—local authorities were required to assess how many Travellers there were in their area and what provision there was for them. However, there is no way of doing that. By definition, these people are Travellers. Are we talking about the Travellers resident in the county of Wiltshire, the south-west of England, the west of England, Wessex, England or what? There is no scientific way of assessing who these people are, because, by definition, they do not live in one place. A very large number of the Travellers in my constituency come from Ireland. Others come from the continent of Europe.

Incidentally, one interesting side issue is that the Irish and the Romanies will not live on the same site. The site at Thingley junction in my constituency has vacancies, but it is occupied by Irish Travellers. The Romanies, perfectly reasonably, say that they do not want to go there, because the two groups do not like each other. I am just not certain, however, that society has a duty to provide for people who do not happen to like each other. If somebody came to my constituency surgery and said, “I want a council house, but I’m not going to live in that council estate full of Irish people, because I don’t want to live with the Irish,” I would say, “I’m extremely sorry about that madam, but you’re jolly well going to have to put up with it.” The same applies in this case.

As I said, we do not know who these people are. By definition, they are Travellers. The Traveller population in the United Kingdom has been increasing exponentially over the past 30 or 40 years, and I will come back to that in one second. Asking a local authority whether it has enough provision for these people is an impossible question to answer. It cannot, by definition, say, “Yes, we do.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

I will try to be brief, Mrs Brooke, so that other hon. Members may contribute. Thank you for calling me. My comments may seem repetitive to the Minister, but I am told that repetition sometimes helps when dealing with Ministers. The huge number of hon. Members present should demonstrate to him how much of a national problem the issue is, although the Labour party does not seem to be aware of that. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on initiating the debate and on how he has balanced his comments. All hon. Members recognise their obligations to the Traveller community, as they do in respect of every other community in Great Britain. No one would wish to detract from that, and I congratulate hon. Members on how they have dealt with the matter.

The focus of the debate has moved geographically; I think my seat, Lancaster and Fleetwood, is the most northern one represented by hon. Members here. That surely proves the national scale of the problem. I first became aware of the matter that I wish to raise on the evening of 6 November 2009, which happened to be a Friday. At 6 o’clock on a Friday evening, council offices and the planning department shut down.

I was informed by the residents of a small hamlet called Preesall Hill—just 50 or 60 houses—that a triangular piece of land surrounded by roads was suddenly covered in Travellers. They told me that hardcore was being moved in, electricity was being supplied and boarding was being put up. That development went on all over the weekend, when no one could get to the council. I would like to repeat the reference to the word “wilful.” My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire made a significant point about that, and we hope that the Minister will reply to it. If anything can be called wilful, the actions that I have described must fall into that category.

On Monday, the police were called, so they were diverted from other matters. The council was also called—everyone and his aunt were called to consider the matter. It was then discovered that the Travellers had actually bought the land, which posed the council with another problem. The council sought an injunction—in the end, it had to seek three injunctions—to call for a retrospective planning application. By that stage, some of the Travellers’ children were going to the small village school, on which there was also an impact. So, the impacts were starting to add up. The people living in Preesall were saying, “What is going wrong around here? Who can get away with this?” Other hon. Members have mentioned similar responses.

On 2 September last week, the matter finally got to planning—by the way, when it first went to planning, not enough information was supplied, so it had to be deferred. As I say, the matter got to planning on 2 September and there were all the relevant reports—ecology, engineering, highways and so on. The land had been designated as countryside by the local Wyre district plan, and was actually a field. The difference with this case is that a company called Green Planning Solutions turned up at the planning. Its website states:

“we specialise in winning planning permission on difficult sites, usually rural locations including the green belt.”

Meanwhile, a Preesall action group of concerned neighbours had been set up and people who were in the process of selling their properties were unable to do so. People who have jobs and other things to do were taking action to try to restore their community. To be fair to those people, they were also trying to establish some sort of relationship with the Travellers who were by that time arguing that they needed a permanent pitch. By the way, twice over the past 12 months, the Travellers have disappeared somewhere for three months, so they must have sites in other places.

I return to when the matter got to planning. At the meeting, a Mr Green—who apparently runs Green Planning Solutions, which advertises in the way I have described—boasted to the Wyre planning committee that he usually wins most of his cases. He said that 47% of his cases go to appeal and that he usually wins 94% of those. Apparently, he warned the council that if it dared to appeal, it would cost the council and taxpayers dear.

[Heather Wheeler]

I hesitate to interrupt because my hon. Friend is in mid-flow and, as ever, he is excellent to listen to. What I find absolutely galling—this may help other hon. Members in this Chamber—is that we have had five planning permissions go through under which Travellers have now got authorised sites, but the Travellers are not there. Where are they? Why do they need those sites? They have got them, apparently, only because of need, but they have not been on them for 12 months. Lancaster and Fleetwood should get on with it. This is just outrageous.

[Eric Ollerenshaw]

Thank you, Derbyshire. I totally agree—whether Travellers want permanent or non-permanent sites. I should also compliment my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) as he has some history on this matter. The point about the definition of Travellers and so on was really pertinent.

In the case that I have mentioned, the Travellers are obviously waiting to see whether there will be an appeal. Nothing has changed on the site, and they are assuming that there will be an appeal, which will lead to costs for a small district council. Meanwhile, Mr Green has boasted that he wins most of his appeals. What does that say to people who pay their rates and do the usual law-abiding thing? As all hon. Members have said, all they want is fairness and for local councils to have the ability and powers to deal with the issues that affect them and their residents.