Gypsy and Traveller Planning

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) on securing the debate and on her excellent speech. My constituents would want to be associated with many of her points. I declare an interest as a serving councillor on Kettering borough council.

I would like to tell hon. Members about a village called Braybrooke in my constituency. There are 22 villages in the parliamentary constituency of Kettering. Braybrooke is situated between the towns of Desborough and Market Harborough, right on the edge of my constituency and on the edge of the county of Northamptonshire. About 325 residents in Braybrooke are on the electoral roll, so it is a small village. However, it is unique in having the only primary school where the pupils are 100% Traveller children, and where the local settled community do not send their children at all. Such a situation exists because of the increase in settlements—pitches—from the Gypsy and Traveller community around the village.

The planning system’s failure to deal with the spread of unauthorised development means that the demographics of the village are being changed in an unacceptable way. I lay the blame for that on the circulars issued by the previous Government and the previous Deputy Prime Minister, which my hon. Friend the Member for Witham mentioned. However, the coalition Government have a chance to change that. My constituents in Kettering, the residents of Braybrooke and myself are looking to the Minister to do something about the matter. We have been in government for 15 months and a consultation is under way. We need to get a move on because my constituents’ hopes have been raised by initiatives such as the Localism Bill and the consultation. We want the Minister to introduce some appropriate policies to stop these unauthorised developments in the future.

[Mr Ward]

I would be very surprised if all the children attending the school were living on unauthorised sites. Many schools in Bradford are 100% white or 100% Asian. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that we should not allow those schools to exist?

[Mr Hollobone]

No. What I am saying is that local primary schools are comprehensive and they should attract children from the local area, regardless of their background. This is not an issue of race; it is an issue of behaviour. When I visited the school recently—it is an excellent school that provides good education—I discovered that one of the big problems was that, especially in the summer term, a lot of the Traveller children do not turn up because they are off travelling. A member of the settled community would be reluctant to send their child to a school with such a disruptive atmosphere. I am trying to approach the subject in a sensitive and thoughtful way without going down the route of saying that this is some kind of racial problem. It is an educational and behavioural problem, which needs to be addressed.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

As usual, my hon. Friend is making a very astute speech. Does he share my concern that the disruption and huge turnover of children in the Traveller community has a massive impact not only on the education of children who are not Traveller children, but on resource allocation for teachers and teaching support staff in those schools? In the long run, that has an impact on standard assessment tests and other results.

[Mr Hollobone]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. He speaks out on behalf of his constituents in Peterborough extremely well. On this issue, I am sure he has the pulse of not only his constituency but the nation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Witham said, Travellers are using the Human Rights Act 1998 in relation to access to local schools and as a way to get permission for their previously unauthorised developments. I am trying to say that we should look at the matter the other way round. What about the rights of the settled community in the village of Braybrooke, who are not sending their children to the local school?

[Mike Weatherley (Hove) (Con)]

After pressure from me and my constituency office, we have managed to persuade Brighton and Hove council to charge some long-term van dwellers at Medina house some rates to pay for the services they use. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a good way forward and that some councils could consider doing that to make these people integrate more into the community, or at least to get some return for the services they use?

[Mr Hollobone]

I am most grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention; he makes an extremely powerful point. As our mutual hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) said earlier, it is all very well for Travellers and others to jump up and down about their rights, but on the other side of the equation is their responsibilities. My hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley) makes an excellent point. Everyone else pays their taxes in the normal way, so Travellers should also pay their fair due to society.

[Andrew George]

As indeed they do on the authorised sites, where those charges and, indeed, local taxes are paid in the proper manner. I do not know about the circumstances in the villages in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, but the conundrum that we as Parliament and the Government are facing is that we have to accept—the hon. Gentleman said he is looking at the matter in a sensitive and thoughtful way— that there is a significant unfulfilled need for Traveller sites in this country. The question is, how do we fulfil that need in a way that does not involve Travellers taking their rights and demanding to live on unauthorised developments? We clearly must not allow that to carry on.

[Mr Hollobone]

I just do not get this point. In the borough of Kettering, lots of people do not have access to the accommodation and housing they need, and thousands of people are on the local authority housing waiting list. It would clearly be wrong to say that, because somebody cannot find the house they need, they can go into the countryside and start building a home of their own. The law would rightly come down on those individuals. Yet members of the Travelling community seem to be able to do exactly that, and they are using the Human Rights Act to get away with it. That is wrong.

My constituents’ fears are being heightened by the latest development around the village of Braybrooke: a site called Greenfields, which is a 37 acre plot. According to the map that has been given to me, the site seems to have been divided up into some 60 plots. It was acquired in the 1990s by a property speculator and the plots are being sold off individually, largely to members of the Travelling community. Buildings—dwellings—are already on some of those plots. The worry is that retrospective planning applications are being made in respect of those dwellings. Given the very poor decisions that are being made by the Planning Inspectorate, the applicants are pretty confident that they will be given retrospective permission to remain there.

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. Does he agree that one of the ways to deal with the matter is simply not to allow—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Garnier]

I thank my hon. Friend again for giving way.

[Mr Hollobone]

It has been a long intervention.

[Mark Garnier]

I think it has been one of the longest interventions in the history of Westminster Hall. My hon. Friend mentioned the planning rules in relation to illegal sites. Does he agree with residents of the village of Churchill in my constituency—an illegal Traveller site has been set up there in the way he has described—that one answer would be to get rid of the rule that allows retrospective planning permission? Planning permission would therefore have to be sought before sites were set up, rather than retrospectively, with all the nonsense about human rights and the rest of it that goes with that.

[Mr Hollobone]

I thank my hon. Friend for that helpful intervention, and I agree with him. The Government need to be far more proactive in tackling the problem of retrospective planning applications, particularly where it applies to the countryside.

There is another issue, which probably affects Wyre Forest as much as Kettering. Those of us with rural or semi-rural constituencies hear all the time about the protections against development in the green belt, but the open countryside in our constituencies seems to have less protection than the green belt. That is sad and regrettable, and it is enhancing the problem of unauthorised development by Gypsy and Traveller groups.

Before the break, I was talking about the new Greenfields site in Braybrooke, which has 60 plots on 37 acres. If it were developed in full, it would be bigger than the village of Braybrooke, near which it is situated, and the local demographics would be changed even more. The difficulty the local council has lies in enforcing the existing planning regulations.

Let me give Members a brief potted history of the site. The land was first acquired in the 1990s by a business that subdivides fields and then sells small parcels of the land via the internet as what it calls leisure plots, or simply as land investments. Early sales resulted in some plots being fenced off, and physical works were undertaken, which were unrelated to agriculture. Caravans were brought on to some plots and used for residential purposes. Wooden buildings were built, and the land was used for keeping horses.

Enforcement notices against such development were issued and served on two specific plots and on the site as a whole. None of the owners appealed the enforcement notices, and those requiring the removal of caravans and associated development are still in force, placing a continuing liability on the landowners. Since the early 1990s, a series of other enforcement notices and stop notices has been served, but the council’s hands are increasingly tied by the guidance on enforcing enforcement notices, which imposes on it the duty to weigh up the likelihood of success, the costs and the proportionality of different courses of action. The end result is that nothing is done.

[Simon Kirby (Brighton, Kemptown) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that existing enforcement powers in relation to unauthorised encampments such as the recent one at Happy Valley in Woodingdean in my constituency are totally insufficient, and that temporary or permanent sites can be only part of the solution? We need to be clear that councils need more powers to enforce notices on what are clearly unauthorised encampments.

[Mr Hollobone]

I am grateful for that helpful intervention. We are beginning to get from the debate some specific courses of action that we would like the Minister to take on board. One would be to deal with the issue of retrospective applications; another would be to beef up the enforcement mechanisms. Unless we have an effective enforcement regime, the problem will grow and become even more of a headache.

We have talked a little about whether there should be a requirement for local authorities to plan for authorised Traveller pitches. If the Government make that a requirement, the proposal is for there to be transitional arrangements whereby local authorities will have six months to put in place a five-year land supply for Traveller sites. My local authority, Kettering borough council, says that six months is not enough and it needs at least 12 months to identify suitable places.

Another thing I want to stress is that, even though consultation is under way, I understand that proposals to change planning policy guidance should be treated as emerging legislation as far as local planning authorities are concerned. Yet there seems to be doubt among some Kettering borough council officials about the weight of the advice. I should like the Minister to state clearly that local authorities should heed the direction of emerging planning guidance from the Government when they make decisions on planning applications.

Finally, please can we do something about the planning inspectorate in Bristol? It is not good enough that it has taken some of the decisions it has, especially on Gypsy and Traveller planning applications. Often, the people concerned do not visit the local authority in question. They do not really know about the local area on which they make decisions. If the coalition Government are serious about devolving decision making down to local residents in the communities where they live, we must take those appeal decisions at a more local level, to ensure that the true voice of local opinion is heard loud and clear.