Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Helen Whately and Andrew Selous

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I am grateful to international care workers who have come to the UK to look after loved ones. Their work has contributed to reducing vacancies and increasing the supply of social care, but we need to get the balance right between international recruitment and our homegrown workforce. We are carrying out ambitious reforms of our adult social care workforce, and therefore it is right, alongside that, to ensure that we have the right numbers of people coming here from overseas for social care. That is why we have worked with the Home Office on changes to visas.

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

The managers of the wonderful care home I visited in Dunstable on Friday were annoyed by the number of job applicants for care places who were making the interview stage and then not arriving on the day. Can the Minister have a word with ministerial colleagues at the Department for Work and Pensions to ensure that job coaches are certain that jobseekers are not wasting the time of care homes? It is not fair, and those who work in care homes are busy people with a lot to do.

[Helen Whately]

I work closely with colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions on the recruitment of people looking for jobs in social care, and I will raise that point with my colleague in the Department.

Gypsies and Travellers

Debate between Helen Whately and Andrew Selous

Wednesday 12th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous]

My hon. Friend is right. What we want is equality under the law.

Our previous experience is of caravans crashing through hedges on a Friday night and farmland being turned into a residential neighbourhood, with street lighting, pavements and utilities going in, in total contravention of planning law. On 4 February 2014, in my last debate on this issue, the then Minister said that

“we need to ensure that everybody is treated equally.”—[Official Report, 4 February 2014; Vol. 575, c. 19WH.]

Allowing that type of behaviour, which settled residents would not be allowed to engage in, shows that the law is not operating equally in this area. My request to the Minister is for his Department to undertake an immediate full-scale review of Gypsy and Traveller policy to ensure better outcomes for Traveller children, as well as greater protection from some of the criminality I have outlined, which affects both settled residents and Travellers themselves.

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

On the point about equality, my constituents are very much pressing for equal and fair treatment of settled residents and Travellers in planning. In part, the problem is the lack of a five-year land supply. Where that is the case, we are getting large, semi-permanent Traveller sites in places that would simply not be given permission for permanent housing development. That is unacceptable for residents.

[Andrew Selous]

I thank my hon. Friend; I will deal with those issues shortly.

I do not have time in this debate to outline every policy suggestion that Central Bedfordshire Council and Bedfordshire police have put to me. I will send the Minister their full submissions and raise the following points now.

The Land Registry is out of date for many Traveller sites, and the owners listed are uncontactable. This makes enforcement very difficult, and we also know there is significant sub-letting of Traveller pitches to non-Travellers. That is one of the reasons why my constituents strongly question whether the Gypsy and Traveller accommodation assessment process is legitimate. How can the Government insist on ever more pitches in an area if many of them are being sub-let to non-Travellers? The Planning Inspectorate even ignores advertisements on “Right Move” for Traveller sites. As I mentioned earlier, many of the caravans sub-let are in a terrible condition. Constituents renting one came to see me to say they had no water and no heating, for example.

The current suite of enforcement powers is designed primarily to deal with breaches among settled residents. The powers available to local authorities in respect of site licensing are intended for Park Home sites and are not fit for purpose when applied to Gypsy and Traveller sites, especially where the land ownership is unknown and there is a mismatch between the planning consent and land ownership, where plot boundaries, land ownership and the planning consent are not configured to a red line on a map.