Stephen Pound
Main Page: Stephen Pound (Labour - Ealing North) Gypsies and Travellers and Local Communities
Stephen Pound Excerpts
Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)
With your permission, Mr Deputy Speaker, I shall breach the normal partisan rules of the House and say that the Minister of State made what I thought was an excellent speech, in which he balanced the humanity that should inform us all with the frustration and annoyance that affect so many of our constituents. I felt that he spoke very well indeed, and that his words were matched by those of my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd).
May I home in on what we are actually talking about this evening? We are discussing Gypsies and Travellers and the impact on local communities. I think we have accepted that 76% of the people who identified themselves in the census as members of the travelling community are in fact resident, but it is other people about whom we are talking. I will not stigmatise them by saying that they are of a particular ethnicity or origin, or that one can tell where they come from by their accents, because I do not like that. Everyone in the Chamber knows what we are talking about here. Let us talk about the people who are having an impact on our constituents, because they are the people who have chosen to live outside the law. To live outside the law you must be honest, and the problem is that people who are living outside the law are causing great distress and great pain.
It breaks my heart that many of us who are of Irish origin or have Irish backgrounds feel that, in many respects, we are stigmatised by the association with Irish Travellers, when the truth is much more than that. Ealing does not contain verdant fields and great open spaces where the lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea and the plowman homeward plods his weary way, but we experience regular incursions by Travellers.
Matt Western
In contrast, we have a lot of greenery around us in Warwick and Leamington, and the summer saw a significant rise in the number of communities setting themselves up in the constituency. The authorities are under huge pressure, and I really feel for them, because they are hamstrung by the planning laws as they stand. They are also not aided—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Gentleman must sit down. This is an intervention, and interventions are meant to be very short. A great many Members wish to speak, so I cannot allow people to make speeches in the form of interventions.
Stephen Pound
I take the point made by my hon. Friend. I think that many of us feel the same irritation.
As I was saying, Ealing is not blessed with huge open spaces, but the open spaces that we have tend to be public parks, school playing fields, sports fields and golf courses, every one of which has suffered from a Traveller incursion in the last few years. It is not as if Ealing is one of the boroughs that say, “We will have no Travellers.” It is not a borough that sets its face against people who have every right to identify themselves as having a certain ethnicity. We have a caravan site. Every time there is an unauthorised encampment in the borough, we investigate the status of the children to establish whether they are receiving education and what their health conditions are. We do not try to shove people off without a second thought. Nevertheless, between 2012 and this summer there have been 140 illegal occupations in the London borough of Ealing, the majority of which have been on council land.
I have had interactions with the travelling community since the mid-1970s, as a housing officer, as a housing association officer, as a councillor, and even as a mayor and a Member of Parliament. I entirely accept that there are some who will approach you when they move on to the land and say, “I am the guy in charge: if you have any problems, come and see me.” Others, however, will commit the most ghastly antisocial behaviour, such as throwing stones at cars, and a couple of weeks ago there were some horses at a petrol station on the A40. That is cruelty to the horses, but it is also pretty appalling for the people who live in the area.
There are some who take things too far in the wrong direction, and worst of all are those who use the encampment for fly-tipping. There is no more heart-breaking sight than a sports field where a group of amateur footballers have been trying to get together to play football—to bring people together for the good of the community—and there is a 2-metre-deep pile of asbestos-ridden household waste that costs us a fortune to clear up. Let me give the House a rough idea of what that means. The legal costs alone in the London borough of Ealing between June 2016 and the present time were more than £200,000, and officer time amounted to more than £130,000. Our borough is not swimming in cash. I doubt that any Member in the Chamber represents a constituency that has more money than it knows what to do with, but our clear-up costs amounted to £250,000.
These are not really encampments. They are, in fact, illegal businesses. I pay tribute to Ealing council officers such as Yasmin Basterfield, Chris Bunting, Jess Murray and Paul Murphy—not the other Paul Murphy; the one in Ealing—who do an incredible amount of work with their teams. However, we do not have the confidence of the local community that we can sufficiently address this issue. What happens is that, suddenly, a great glistening cavalcade of chromium-plated 4x4s—if only it were a caravanserai!—roars down and sets up an encampment on our open space, and then the problems start.
In the brief time that remains to me, I shall ask the Minister four basic questions, to which I want to hear four answers. Section 61 has been mentioned, and section 61 is not good enough. It needs to be enforced properly. What guidance will the Minister give his right hon. Friend the Home Secretary about a protocol to enforce it? Why cannot legal advisers in magistrates courts sign the warrants over the weekend? Will the Minister at least speak to the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who is present, to establish whether the Ministry of Justice can do something about that? Every vehicle that arrives can be identified through a registration number. Why can those numbers not be used to identify the people who are responsible for the crime, and then prosecute them? What could possibly be wrong with that?
Finally, could we have a few bob from the Government for the unanticipated costs of clearing up? Frankly, it is crippling us in the London borough of Ealing.
Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)
My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) sought to leave the Minister with two impressions: one was a series of four questions—we all look forward to the answers—and the other was a compliment on his speech. I am afraid that I cannot agree with my hon. Friend, because I thought the speech lacked any ministerial intent to do anything about this problem.
The problem is increasing across the country, particularly in the west midlands and certainly in Coventry, which I have represented for a few years now. Over the past five years, the number of illegal encampments—I stress that I am talking only about the illegal encampments—has doubled. We are facing an irritant that is causing real problems and that, in the end, will breed exactly the sort of prejudice, bias and racial discrimination that the previous Labour Government sought to prevent through legislation, which I approved of. The simple fact is that the problem is coming back and it is corrosive, and the whole Gypsy and Traveller community is being affected as a result, which is totally wrong because we are talking about a small percentage, but the illegal occupation of these encampments is increasing.
The Government’s response leaves a lot to be desired. When we look at what they have done, we see that the previous Secretary of State, under the coalition Government, was convicted in the High Court for racial discrimination. We have seen the Government remove from local authorities the statutory obligation to at least carry out a census of the arrangements in place for sites in their areas. It is a pattern of disengagement from the problem, which we all face. It is not just the large metropolitan areas, such as the west midlands, because we have heard Conservative Members refer to county councils across the country making representations.
I say this to the Minister: for goodness’ sake, show some ministerial authority, concern and drive to sort this problem out. What have we had instead? We have had a promise that there will be a consultation. Nobody could be against consultation—we can even warmly welcome it, as the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) did. He said that it was the greatest thing he had ever heard, and the next minute he said that the time for action is now. Well, the time for action has been kicked into the long grass. The Minister does not need a consultation to answer the four questions. He does not have the answers, but he could find them. That is what I urge him to do tonight, and this is the brunt of what I want to say.
Mr Robinson
No, my hon. Friend has had a good go already and other Members wish to speak. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Laura Pidcock) wants to contribute, for example.
The Minister has had an offer—it is unprecedented, in my experience—from the West Midlands police and crime commissioner to get into a dialogue about specifics, because we need action or legislation from the Government, not consultation. That, together with a bit of money here and there, could make a big difference—we can never solve this problem—in reducing the frequency and intensity of these encampments. That is what we are looking for: action, not words, though, yes, consultation will allow us all to play our part.
The Minister has offered us a meeting. If I was in his position, I would have asked for that meeting: “Come in and let’s see what we can do together.” We now speak as a combined authority in the west midlands, as many hon. Friends will do this evening. We can offer the cross- county and cross-borough co-operation that the Minister is looking for, but we need a lead from the Government that they want action in this area, and a bit of money would make all the difference. For goodness’ sake, get going and, while the consultation is ongoing, devise a plan of action to implement the decisions afterwards. We have been waiting for the final draft of the guidance to local authorities for months, and the draft that was produced was virtually acceptable. Put an end to this drift and disengagement, get a grip and show yourself to be a Minister by doing something about it.