Lord Avebury
Main Page: Lord Avebury (Liberal Democrat - Excepted Hereditary)Caravan Sites Bill [HL]
Lord Avebury Excerpts
Lord Avebury
My Lords, perhaps I may start by giving the House a bit of history. Under the Caravan Sites Act 1968, local authorities were required to provide sites for Gypsies residing in or resorting to their area. If they failed to comply, the Minister had the power to direct them to provide such number of sites with such number of pitches as was specified in the directions. That Act produced 350 pitches until it was repealed by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. No further progress was then made until 2007, when local authorities were required to conduct a Gypsy and Traveller accommodation needs assessment, a GTANA, under the Housing Act 2004, and to produce a strategy for meeting identified needs under the Local Government Act 2003. The needs assessments were subject to public inquiry, and there was a process for redistributing the numbers to take into account the failure of some authorities to make any contribution in counties where general need had been demonstrated.
At the most recent election, the Liberal Democrats were in favour of abolishing the regional spatial strategies. In our manifesto we called for the retention of the numbers that had been agreed for Gypsy site planning permissions in two regions, and of those that were on the way elsewhere. However, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government scrapped the plans immediately after the general election, leaving a planning vacuum in which councils had carte blanche to decide whether any sites were needed in their area and, if so, for how many caravans.
As a result, the number of families living in caravans on unauthorised sites is expected to increase from 2,400 in 2010 to 3,000 by 2015. Local authorities are not expected to reduce this shortage by providing sites themselves. In 2010 an Equality and Human Rights Commission survey of local authority provision of caravan sites found that in more than half of local authorities there was either a zero or a negative change in the number of council-provided pitches between 2006 and 2009.
In theory this bleak scenario ought to change as a result of the £47 million that the Housing and Communities Agency will make available to councils and social housing providers between now and 2015 for new and refurbished sites, and the additional £13 million that was to be allocated by tomorrow. However, as we know, the minute that there is any sign of an intention to develop a site, there is an immediate campaign against it by local residents that councillors find it inexpedient to resist. At best, there are long delays in implementing the plan; at worst, it gets cancelled altogether. It would be useful to have a progress report on the HCA’s traveller pitch funding scheme—not this afternoon but through placing a copy in the Library—and for the report to be updated quarterly. I ask my noble friend to see that that is done.
Even if the HCA programme is completed in the next three and a half years, the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain calculates that it would produce 520 new pitches rather than the 750 suggested by DCLG. There was a shortage of 2,000 pitches in the latest DCLG caravan count, so only one-quarter of the deficit would be eliminated—even without taking into account any increase in the number of Traveller households over the period. I wrote to the Secretary of State asking for his comments on the ITMB arithmetic and the reply from the Under-Secretary, Bob Neill, did not rebut its calculations, nor did he deny that Essex, Kent, Cambridgeshire, Surrey and Hertfordshire, with one-quarter of England’s caravans, had received only 4% of the money.
No doubt the Government will say that private development by Travellers of their own sites will make up the deficit under DCLG’s planning policy for Traveller sites, the PPTS. This requires local authorities to produce an evidence-based development plan demonstrating a five-year supply of deliverable sites, with pitch targets, by 27 March 2013. I understand that the local plans team in DCLG has a file listing the progress towards this objective in every local authority in England. I would be grateful if my noble friend would kindly arrange for a copy to be placed in the Library, now and at the end of each quarter until the deadline, so that we can see what progress is being made.
If any local authority fails to produce the required plan by 27 March next year, and thereafter until they do so, PPTS says that that will be a significant material consideration on applications for grants of temporary, but not of permanent, planning permission. To the extent that, as a result, some families may be given a precarious tenure under which they may occupy the land that they own themselves, this provision will merely add to the 1,600 caravans on the so-called tolerated sites rather than contributing to a permanent solution for the shortage.
An inspector has to conduct an inquiry into the local development plan, but this will not make up the deficiency. On the one side of the hearing will be vociferous local objectors to any sites at all, and on the other there will be the poorly resourced Traveller organisations, who will not be able to appear before 350 separate inquiries between now and the end of March next year.
In parenthesis, much of the blame for the universal hostility to Travellers rests on certain sections of the media that have incited hatred by racist articles and broadcasts. This was discussed at a round-table meeting held in a Committee Room upstairs on 19 June, organised by the ITMB and attended by Travellers and media representatives, at which the media did not deny that there is a cause and effect relationship between the incessantly racist reporting of stories about Travellers and the attitude of settled communities.
However, there are other ways of resisting planning applications built into PPTS. Local authorities are enjoined to strictly limit new Traveller site development in open countryside, and sites in green belts are labelled inappropriate. Thus Dale Farm, from which 60 families were evicted at a cost to Basildon Council of £4.8 million, plus Essex Police costs of £2.4 million, will stand no better chance in future in spite of the fact that its previous use was as a scrap yard.
The National Planning Policy Framework says in paragraph 89 that while construction of new buildings should be regarded as inappropriate in a green belt, there are exceptions,
“including limited infilling or the partial or complete redevelopment of previously developed sites”.
There is no express reference to this paragraph in PPTS and the expression “construction of new buildings” is not as wide as “use of land”. Can my noble friend give an assurance that paragraph 89 is intended to cover Traveller sites as well as other types of development? Otherwise I suggest that it might be held to be discriminatory under the Equality Act.
Included in the Dale Farm figures mentioned was a grant from DCLG of £1.2 million, originally vetoed by my honourable friend Andrew Stunell but then approved by Grant Shapps. Your Lordships may well think that it was perverse to spend all those millions on that operation at a time when local and central government were supposed to be making cuts. It seems that the mantra about reducing the deficit does not apply to spending on kicking Travellers out of their homes. We were deaf to appeals from the Council of Europe High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination not to allow this eviction to take place.
The effect of the PPTS restrictions on the location of Traveller sites will be to drive Travellers towards land on the edges of towns and villages, where not only is the resistance to their presence likely to be most intense but the cost of the land is going to be highest. How can the Bill deal with some of these problems? The current indications are that local authorities are likely to produce pitch targets that collectively are significantly lower than the actual need. A survey of 100 local authorities in three regions found that where pitch targets had been developed, they were 82% lower than in the former regional spatial strategies, inadequate as those were. The Bill would address this situation and lead to the development of sufficient pitches to meet the actual need. The Bill translates into statute the policy in the PPTS that states that local authorities should identify specific land for Travellers residing in or resorting to their areas, and requires them to have regard to the needs assessments—the GTANAs that I have already mentioned—produced under the Housing Act 2004. If the figures that emerge from the current process, under which 350 local authorities have been given carte blanche to make up their own minds, are lower than the ones in the GTANAs, that would be a factor in future appeals.
As a longstop, where the PPTS process arrives at a manifestly inadequate supply, the Bill gives the Secretary of State power to direct the local authority to grant planning permission for caravan sites for the accommodation of such number of caravans as may be specified in the directions. This is an analogue of the power in the 1968 Act to direct a local authority to provide the actual sites themselves. The provision of sites under that Act only really got under way when the direction power was used on a few authorities. It had a significant effect in encouraging others to come up to the mark and, in the absence of an equivalent today, the objective that I hope we all share of eliminating unauthorised encampments will be unsatisfied another 45 years from now. The fashion these days is to leave more decisions to the unfettered discretion of local authorities but, with regard to solving the shortage of Traveller sites, the experience of the last half century shows that that does not work.
I draw noble Lords’ attention to one other departure from the PPTS in this Bill. The definition of “Gypsies and Travellers” used here is taken from the Housing Act 2004 because it is essential to recognise that Travellers are no longer only,
“persons of nomadic habit of life”,
but include,
“persons with a cultural tradition of nomadism or of living in a caravan”.
The people who we are dealing with in this Bill may have a cultural aversion to living in bricks and mortar, and that is why sites need to be provided for them, but the majority of them have ceased travelling because there are practically no transit sites left in the whole country. They may visit fairs such as the Appleby Horse Fair, but that lasts for only one week and is more of a holiday destination than a stopping place in an itinerant life. The PPTS definition has led to difficulties in the courts because, in order for a Gypsy or Traveller woman to be treated as such, she needs to be able to show that at some point in the past she has followed a nomadic way of life.
From many points of view, we should welcome the fact that Travellers are now prepared to live mostly in one place because that enables them to access education, health and other public services, in all of which they are severely disadvantaged. In education, for example, Travellers are at the bottom of the scale for attendance, exclusions and achievement and, although some progress has been made in recent years, it has proved far harder to raise standards with families that are still mobile.
Finally, the settled population must surely welcome greater efforts to eliminate the problem of unauthorised encampments. One can understand that people do not like having neighbours with no access to running water, sanitation or means of refuse disposal, but the stronger powers of eviction that have been granted to local authorities are not the answer. All that has been achieved by the evictions at Dale Farm, for instance, is that many of the families are still there either in the neighbouring Oak Lane or doubled up, still unlawfully, with friends and relatives on the legal site next door. There was literally nowhere else for them to go. You cannot uninvent people, as an official of the ITMB said to me yesterday.
A former resident on the Dale Farm site, Mary Sheridan said:
“For all that money all they’ve done is move us 50 metres. We will stay on the lane because where else can we go?”.
The same will be true on a lesser scale for other threatened evictions such as at Smithy Fen in Cambridgeshire or Meriden in Warwickshire. These and many more evictions are utterly pointless since the local authorities concerned will either have to deal with another unauthorised encampment on their own doorstep, as in Basildon, or manage to pass the parcel onto a neighbouring authority. If the Bill goes into Committee, I will propose an amendment suspending evictions from unauthorised sites that are owned by the occupiers until adequate accommodation has been provided in the county or borough concerned.
The objective to which the Bill is a contribution has been on the agenda for the last half-century and it is about time we solved it decisively, for the mutual benefit of both Travellers and the settled population. I beg to move.
Lord Avebury
My Lords, first, I am grateful to my noble friend for reaffirming the commitment that the Government have undertaken to provide adequate planning permissions for Gypsy and Traveller sites throughout the whole of England. However, she did not address the point that was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, about the gaps between what paper policy says and what happens in practice. This has always been the bedevilment of any policy on Gypsy and Traveller sites: Governments profess their intentions of doing the right thing but, when you come to the delivery at the grass roots, it does not happen. Nor did she address the point, which I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Collins, reinforced, about the capacity of Travellers to engage with local authorities on local development plans. One can foresee that under the system that my noble friend outlined, the PPTS will result in Traveller site plans being produced locally, but the inquiries that will subsequently take place will not be on a level playing field but instead will be severely biased in favour of those who do not want to see any development of Gypsy and Traveller sites, against the pitifully small resources of the Gypsy and Traveller community. The Bill is predicated on the assumption that the Government’s policy is not going to deliver the required sites. That is the whole point of it. We should allow the Bill to go into Committee so that we can engage more carefully than we have at Second Reading on the details of these arguments.
My noble friend did not respond to the two points that I asked her about specifically, which were that we should have a quarterly report on progress towards implementation of the £60 million Traveller sites grant, and that we should know what plans the local authorities have under the proposed system. As far as I am concerned, not a single local authority in the country has come up with the figures that were suggested in March this year. We have another eight months to go before they have to produce that arithmetic. All the 350 local inquiries are being condensed into a very short time, which, as I say, will add to the pressures on Gypsy and Traveller communities in being able to contest the plans, if they think them inadequate.
I am grateful to both the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and to my noble friend for their agreement in principle that the task that the Government face is to provide proper accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers and to eliminate unauthorised encampments, which are to the detriment of both the settled communities and the Gypsy population.