Gypsies and Travellers and Local Communities

James Heappey Excerpts

Monday 9th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tony Lloyd]

My hon. Friend invites one of my conclusions and I will come on to exactly that point.

[James Heappey (Wells) (Con)]

Does the shadow Minister not accept that the problem with requiring the provision of authorised sites is that a county cannot accept unlimited liability for those sites just because it happens to be a popular place for Travellers to visit? Most local authorities have provided a reasonable number of sites, but demand exceeds supply. It cannot be down to the taxpayer to meet that demand no matter what.

[Tony Lloyd]

The hon. Gentleman is not right: many local authorities are not providing any sites and we need to establish that fact. If there are no sites, we will simply move people from one illegal, antisocial encampment to another, however much we operate the revolving door. That achieves nothing, and is neither rational nor fair to the communities who bear the burden of those illegal visitations.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Heappey (Wells) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), with whom I very much agree. I am delighted that we have time this evening for this important debate, and I thank Sedgemoor and Mendip District Councils and Somerset County Council for the enthusiasm with which they provided me with information for my contribution. That tells us something about how big an issue this is for them. It is also an issue of real importance for my constituents, who have been angered again and again by illegal encampments.

In the past two years, there have been illegal encampments in Berrow, Street and routinely in the car parks and sports club of Burnham-on-Sea. There have been illegal encampments in Shepton Mallet and Brean as well as the more “permanent” Traveller sites with dubious planning status at Pilton, Theale, Cross and Wick—and, until recently, Rodney Stoke.

There is a sense that there is one rule for the travelling community and one rule for everyone else. I want to share some quick examples of illegal encampments with the House, to draw out some points about their cost and the frustration of local communities and councils.

In June, just before the Glastonbury festival, there was an illegal encampment near the festival site in Shepton Mallet. Mendip District Council moved as quickly as it could to initiate legal proceedings, but it still took 10 days, and even then, when the Travellers were being escorted out of the town, they tried to break into the local park to reoccupy that instead. The cost to the Travellers of their time in the town was absolutely nothing. The cost to Mendip District Council was £27,745, and that does not include the policing costs of trying to escort them out of the town at the end of that illegal encampment.

In Burnham-on-Sea, at the Pier Street car park, the Travellers know exactly how long they can stay. They come back again and again—often it is different groups of Travellers—and every time Sedgemoor District Council has to initiate the legal process, at a cost of £355, plus the cost of staff and solicitors’ fees. To make things fair, when the Travellers are in the car park, the council suspends car parking charges for everybody else. That is great for those shopping in the town, but it means lost revenue for the council.

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

That did not happen in my constituency, where we had the farce of people parking in the car park and receiving fines—these were legal motorists—which I then had to get overturned by the council. That again emphasises that there is one rule for one and another rule for another.

[James Heappey]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Indeed, that was exactly what happened when we had the very first occupation in Burnham-on-Sea. Traffic wardens were giving tickets to those who had parked legally but overrun, while the Travellers were allowed to be there without penalty. We are talking about the main tourist car park for what is—I can say this now that my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) has left the Chamber—Somerset’s premier seaside resort. The presence of an illegal encampment in that car park—especially one right next door to the coach park, which is an important part of our town’s business—creates entirely the wrong first impression, may well lose us business and certainly costs local businesses nearby, and that is without mentioning the clean-up costs that the local council incurs as well.

In the nearby village of Berrow, there was a Traveller encampment on the village green. Given the mess that the green was left in afterwards, Berrow chose as a village to spend quite a large proportion of its annual precept on building a bund all the way around the green. I question whether money that is hard earned by parish councils should be spent on preventing illegal activity rather than on more positive improvements for the community altogether.

I should also mention that there have routinely been encampments on private land up in Brean, a popular tourism destination, which means that businesses that contribute enormously to our local economy are left holding the baby and are responsible for bringing in the bailiffs and moving those Travellers on. Additionally, Somerset County Council has told me that in the last three years it has spent nearly £25,000 on moving Travellers on from the public highway and a further £6,000 on the clean-up costs afterwards. At every turn, there is an asymmetric cost—a cost to councils, Avon and Somerset police, local businesses and the community, but no cost whatsoever to the Travellers who have made the illegal encampment.

The argument is that illegal encampments are an issue only if there is inadequate provision of authorised sites, but there are 64 authorised pitches in Somerset. In Bath and North East Somerset and in North Somerset, the two adjoining local authorities, there are a further 50, so there are 114 pitches available in the county of Somerset. How many can the taxpayer be expected to provide? We live in a beautiful part of the world, with a good local economy, but surely our liability for Travellers cannot be unlimited or set simply by Traveller demand. We must be willing to say what is a fair provision for councils to offer. We must reduce costs to local authorities or find a way to pass them on to the Travellers who are illegally encamped.

We must ensure that the process is quicker, so that we end this cat-and-mouse game, whereby the Travellers understand exactly how long they can stay, stay for exactly that long and then move on before they incur any cost, while the council has incurred all the cost in the process. The Irish option, which a number of colleagues have discussed this evening, is well worth looking at. We must ensure that the rules are fair for both the travelling and the settled communities. There can no longer be one law for the Travellers and another for everyone else.