Gypsies and Travellers (Local Communities)

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Gypsies and Travellers and local communities.

It is a privilege for all of us to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. You take a close interest in matters to do with Gypsies and Travellers, and I hope I can inform you and the House about the difficulties being caused to my constituents by Gypsies and Travellers, whether they are travelling or have decided to set up permanent pitches in the countryside.

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On resuming—

[Mr Hollobone]

I want to explain the impact that Gypsies and Travellers are having on my constituency, Kettering, not only when Travellers travel, but when they decide not to be Travellers any more and to settle. In both cases, great problems are being caused to my constituents.

I welcome the Minister to his place and I know that he is keen to engage on this issue at an early stage in his ministerial career, which I know will be one of great promise. I know that we will not be able to change the law as a result of today’s debate, but he can signal to us the great heights that he will reach in short order by scrapping section 225 of the Housing Act 2004, which requires local authorities to conduct separate housing needs assessments for Gypsies and Travellers.

The Government are looking at scrapping the Human Rights Act 1998, which would also help to address the issue and I would be happy to support that proposal. I believe that the part of the Equality Act 2010 that applies to Gypsies and Travellers should also be scrapped, but if the Minister made a start with the Housing Act 2004, it would be a signal of real intent. I simply do not see why—and nor do my constituents—there should be any special provision at all within the planning system for Gypsies and Travellers. After all, something like 1 million eastern Europeans have just come to our shores, rightly or wrongly. Do we have special planning provision for the accommodation needs of eastern Europeans? No, we do not. Why should we single out Gypsies and Travellers as a supposed ethnic group for special treatment in planning laws?

I am not advocating that we should pick on this community. I am advocating, on behalf of my constituents, that the law of the land should apply equally to all of us regardless of our racial or ethnic background when it comes to housing needs and planning permissions.

The reason for today’s debate is that, recently, Daventry District Council—the neighbouring authority to Kettering Borough Council, on which I have the privilege to serve as a councillor—recently granted permission for two additional pitches for a piece of land near the village of Arthingworth in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), which is near the village of Braybrooke in the Kettering constituency. For many local people on both sides of the local authority boundary, that really is a step too far, because there is now an over-concentration of Gypsy and Traveller sites in that part of the Northamptonshire countryside.

Let me describe the scene. The village of Braybrooke has 334 voters on the electoral roll and consists of 145 dwellings—it is situated halfway between the towns of Desborough and Market Harborough—and yet, within a small distance around it there are 67 Gypsy and Traveller pitches, which have completely overwhelmed the local countryside. Local people are fed up that there is such a large number of sites in the vicinity of their homes, not least because of the behaviour of the Gypsies and Travellers who live on those pitches. I will read some examples of constituents’ comments:

“We are wary of putting our name to a list of our problems with these people as they know where we live and farm and can be very intimidating both verbally and physically…We have known some of the ‘travelling’ families in this locality for over 35 years.”

They cause problems with fly-grazing, for example. Furthermore:

“Hare coursing has been a problem throughout all of those years…Fly tipping is an on-going problem along road verges and in gateways…Setting fire to straw stacks, we now do not put more than 200 bales in a stack. Also burning of electric cable and garden waste on their sites permitting smoke to cross the road…Theft is also an on-going problem. They call at the farm buildings asking for scrap metal or batteries—then within weeks items are stolen. We have diesel stolen on a regular basis, it is no good putting a padlock on the tank as they then puncture the tank and you lose the lot. Other items stolen are gates, buckets of minerals, electric fencing with posts and energizers, hand tools, electric saws, quad bikes, farm machinery and motor vehicles…We do not advise the police of every incident because experience has taught us that little is done and no one is ever caught or prosecuted.”

[Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend share my bafflement that Travellers are treated as a vulnerable community when, in fact, most of them have far greater wealth than we in this room will ever have? The point is not about ethnicity or where Travellers may originate from, but about their behaviour. Our constituents are concerned not about the fact that they have chosen a nomadic lifestyle, but about their behaviour and disruption to the local community when they arrive. I have not yet met a serving police officer who does not say that when Travellers are in town, there is a spike in local crime.

[Mr Hollobone]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and he has demonstrated with those comments how he so ably represents his constituents in Devon, because he has put his finger right on it. Indeed, we have evidence from the 2011 census, which tells us that three quarters of Gypsies and Travellers live in permanent houses, bungalows or flats; only one quarter live in caravans or mobile homes.

[Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)]

As always, my hon. Friend is making a very powerful argument. My local authority of York proposed two new Traveller sites in my constituency and is he not surprised that when it was calculating the need for those sites, it counted Travellers in bricks and mortar—Travellers who are adequately housed—as in desperate need? That contributed to the requirement, as the authority calls it, for two new Traveller sites.

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[Mr Hollobone]

The name of my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) is well known in my constituency, because he is a hero to the horse-owning community as a result of his pioneering legislation to combat fly-grazing. That legislation has been widely welcomed in Kettering and throughout the land. Am I surprised by what he tells us from his own constituency? I am not surprised. Am I disappointed? Yes, I am, because the law is working against the settled community and in favour of Gypsies and Travellers.

Many of my hon. Friend’s constituents and many of mine who do not come from a Gypsy or Traveller background actually do far more travelling than the supposed Travellers themselves. Many of my constituents travel down to London and back every day for work. They do far more travelling than the supposed Travellers in the illegal encampments, but the law is biased in this respect, and this is something that the Minister could deal with as his second initiative in the Department. The guidance that his Department gives local authorities means that they need to make provision for a 3% annual increase in Gypsy and Traveller household numbers. That growth rate is far too big, yet by law local authorities are required to draw up assessments to provide pitches for that rate of growth. So not only is the number of Gypsies and Travellers as a baseline too high; the annual growth rate that the Department requires local authorities to respond to is also too great.

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

I was going to let this go, but I just cannot; I refer to the hon. Gentleman’s earlier point about whether Travellers travel as much as people from his constituency. He surely realises that Gypsies and Travellers are a known ethnic group and whether or not they travel does not take away from the fact that they are an ethnic group. Whether or not they are actually travelling does not matter in order for them to be recognised as a Gypsy or a Traveller.

[Mr Hollobone]

The romantic notion of Gypsies wandering through the countryside, entertaining people as they go, is a myth from long ago, because many of these supposed Travellers are self-declared Travellers; they are not from any kind of Gypsy heritage at all. However, they are using, on a self-declared basis, their nomenclature as Travellers to get special privileges in the planning system. When they then use those privileges not to travel but to get planning permissions for permanent sites so that they can settle down, it is an absolute abuse. Now that we have got the first Conservative Government elected for 23 years, it is time that Her Majesty’s Government acted to stamp out that abuse in the countryside. The current system is also forcing local authorities such as mine to identify sites where pitches can be provided for that supposed growth rate in Travellers.

For example, Kettering Borough Council has to find 25 pitches by 2022. It has identified 17 so far and has another eight to find. Local constituents have been brought to tears because sites near their own homes have been identified as potential pitches. Only when there are determined local councillors, acting on behalf of their local constituents in their wards, who stand up and say, “No, we don’t want Traveller sites in our communities,” can these things be stopped. In Kettering, there was a proposal for a Traveller site near the Scott Road garages in the town itself, and it caused uproar among the local community, who knew that if permission were granted for Traveller pitches on that site, local crime levels would go through the roof. The idea that these provisions in the planning system are helping community cohesion is completely wrong; they are stirring up resentment and hatred between one community and another, and it is time that the new Government did something about it.

Let me give the House further evidence. This is a typical response I have had from a settled dweller in the countryside:

“Since moving to our current address in Braybrooke we have endured fly tipping, theft, many instances of intimidation, and fly grazing.

Since having”—

Travellers’—

“horses removed from our land we have encountered almost daily instances of defecating in our gateway, known to be carried out by this family”.

I am talking about human defecation. That is as disgusting as it gets. The response continues:

“I caught one of them in the act one day. We dare not do anything about it for fear of reprisals.

We cannot leave anything lying around outside as approximately once a week a van with travellers in drives into our yard and out again without stopping, presumably to intimidate or for opportunist theft…My wife and her family can relate…many, many more instances over the last 30 years including hare coursing, theft of equipment, intimidation, fly grazing, dumping of caravans etc. They have given up reporting instances long ago as nothing has ever been done about it and it just seems futile.”

I hope you can see, Mr Davies, the despair and frustration of my constituents, who are really beginning to resent the Gypsy and Traveller community in Northamptonshire, because they are bending the rules of the planning system, which are skewed in their favour, to allow them to get permissions to set up encampments in the countryside. When the local authority refuses those applications, they go to appeal, and all too often the pathetic planning inspectorate allows permission—sometimes temporary permission. When the temporary permission expires after two years, five years or whatever, the local authority is unable to enforce the removal of those encampments, because they cite the Human Rights Act and the provisions therein to protect so-called family life. Also, the Department for Communities and Local Government has issued guidelines to local authorities that they cannot pursue such enforcement if the cost is excessive or disproportionate. It ends up with my village of Braybrooke, in a beautiful part of Northamptonshire and with 145 dwellings, surrounded by 67 inappropriate pitches and a further 27 legal pitches within a further three miles. The whole thing has got completely out of control. In Braybrooke, the primary school has closed, but when it existed, it was made up 100% of children from the Traveller community, because the Traveller children moved into the area and moved into the school, and parents from the settled community moved their children out of the school to go to other schools. Now, the school has closed down, yet in the Department’s own guidelines it says that the scale of such Gypsy and Traveller sites should not dominate the nearest settled community. That might be the wording in the guidance, but it is not having the appropriate impact to save villages such as Braybrooke.

It is only thanks to the good work of residents such as Karen Stanley and the North Northamptonshire Residents Against Inappropriate Development group, who are fearlessly championing the cause of the settled community against threats of intimidation from Gypsies and Travellers, that local residents feel they have any say in this matter at all. Yet it lies in the gift of the Minister to listen to those concerns from the heart of middle England, because he has the power to do something about them. I suggest that section 225 of the Housing Act 2004 should be at the top of his priority list. If he can abolish it, there is every chance that relative peace could return to the countryside, and we could start to rebuild relationships between the settled community and Gypsies and Travellers.

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

I inform colleagues that I intend to call the Front Benchers no later than 5.25 pm. By my observation, three people were seeking to catch my eye, and they can do the arithmetic for themselves.

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[Mr Hollobone]

We have heard contributions from around the country in the past hour—from Hammersmith, Washington, Mid Kent, York, Daventry, Sussex, Cheshire and Devon—and the message from all those parts of the country, with two exceptions, is that there is a problem. The system is not working as well as it might, but we can all agree that the law needs to be applied equally to whoever applies for planning permission. Too many of my constituents are frightened to speak out on this issue for fear of being accused of being racist, and we had a flavour of that this afternoon. If MPs cannot articulate their constituents’ concerns on genuine issues such as this, there is not a role for Parliament.

I encourage the Minister to reissue the guidance on the importance of local authorities working collaboratively when Gypsy and Traveller site applications are on either side of a local authority boundary. I look forward to the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) campaigning for the acre of land that will solve this national problem to be located in the heart of his constituency.