Gypsies and Travellers (Local Communities)

Steve Reed Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Davies, for calling me to speak; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate the hon. Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone)on raising this issue, in which he has a well known and well publicised interest.

I start from a position similar to that of my two hon. Friends the Members for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) and for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson): that members of the Traveller community deserve to have their needs met just as much as members of any other community. Theirs is a way of life and a culture that deserve recognition and respect, but the same is true of the settled community. They also deserve to live their lives in peace, without unacceptable levels of nuisance and annoyance. The key is to find a balance between the needs of the two communities.

As my two hon. Friends have already said, Traveller and Gypsy communities suffer significant levels of social exclusion, and many of the manifestations and problems that we have heard about this afternoon are the result of that exclusion. I will give some statistics: only 47% of Travellers are in work, compared with 63% of the settled population in England and Wales; and 60% of Travellers have no qualifications, which is linked to the fact that many of them find it hard to access education, and indeed health services. There are reports from some areas of GPs refusing to register Travellers or look after them. We also hear about instances of open discrimination —we have heard about some today—and I am sure that everyone involved in this debate would agree that those are wholly unacceptable.

Criminal behaviour should be dealt with by the police and the criminal justice system. If complaints to the police are not being followed up, that is a matter to be raised with the local police—and perhaps here in Parliament with the Government, who have imposed cuts in front-line policing and the criminal justice system that are making the jobs of police and judges harder than they might otherwise have been. However, that situation should not lead us to attempt to demonise an entire community; that would be absolutely the wrong thing to do.

Local and national authorities share a duty to identify sites for Travellers that are big enough to meet their needs and that also allow both the settled and Traveller communities to co-exist peacefully, without there being a domination of the settled communities because there is an over-concentration of Traveller sites in particular areas.

However, there is a big gap between the pressure on local authorities to provide appropriate sites and the lack of support they receive from national Government. The Government continue to make increasing demands of local authorities, while withdrawing from them the resources they need to properly meet those increased demands. It is that kind of failure that leads to some of the problems that we have heard about today from Government Members.

During the general election campaign, I had the opportunity to visit Harlow, where similar issues are being raised by members of the public who have experienced a significant number of illegal Traveller sites around that town, in what appears to be a co-ordinated action by a number of Traveller families. Does the Minister believe that there is any need to review the powers available to local authorities to deal with that kind of co-ordinated action? However, I would certainly not infer from that situation that there is any need to target or smear an entire community with the kind of accusations of mass criminality that we sometimes hear when this issue is being debated.

In February 2012, the Department for Communities and Local Government issued a document called “Creating the Conditions for Integration”, which made some reference to the Gypsy and Traveller communities. Clearly, more support is needed for the Gypsy and Traveller communities to enable them to co-exist with settled communities.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) submitted a written question on 2 June, asking the Secretary of State

“what plans he has to fulfil his Department’s responsibilities for the promotion of community cohesion”

in relation to the settled and Traveller communities. Since my hon. Friend has not yet received a response—I understand that time may not have allowed it—I invite the Minister to share his views today on the point she raised with his boss.

Will the Minister tell us what his response will be to the consultation issued by his Department in September last year on proposals to change planning policy, to address the needs of Travellers in relation to settled communities’ needs where planning may be granted? How many of the 620 new pitches funded by the Homes and Communities Agency in 2013 have been provided? What assessment has he made of the resources councils need to build the new sites that are required and avoid unnecessary tension that leads to the kinds of issues that have been raised on behalf of communities in this debate?