Dale Farm Travellers hope UN official's visit will end their plight

Evicted Travellers living near the Dale Farm site say they are surviving without water or electricity and have nowhere to go.

Confronted by a maelstrom of mud, broken fence posts and smashed up caravans, Jan Jarab, the first UN official to visit Dale Farm, asked the Travellers if this scene of utter devastation was worth fighting for. "Homes are worth fighting for," replied Candy Sheridan, the campaigner still seeking to find new pitches for the homeless families evicted from the scrapyard in Essex four months ago.

Jarab stressed his visit was not a publicity stunt as he refused to talk to the media on the first of a two-day fact-finding mission in which he met Tony Ball, the leader of Basildon council, the local Catholic priest, and evicted Travellers living in caravans without mains electricity or running water just outside Dale Farm.

Travellers are clinging to the hope that the presence of the European representative of the UN high commissioner for human rights will kick-start negotiations with Basildon council to help find a new site. Jarab will also discuss the issue with Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, on Friday.

Despite the £7.2m eviction of 80 families from Dale Farm after a 10-year legal battle, more than 50 children are still camped in caravans on the private road and land immediately outside the former site. "It's hell. Hell," said Nora Sheridan, 47. "We have no toilets. We have no electrics. We have to beg around for a sip of water. Look at the way we are living."

Travellers in the 18 caravans nose-to-tail on the rough track outside Dale Farm complain of constant illness, with raw sewage sloshing down the road from broken septic tanks on the illegal site, which is completely cleared of homes despite four pitches being legal.

All winter, Michelle Sheridan and her four children have had to drive to the sports centre and pay £3.50 every time they want a shower. They borrow the toilet belonging to neighbours on the legal Traveller site next door but some children are simply going to the toilet on the contaminated wasteland of the eviction site. Sheridan said she spent £56 every two weeks on a 47kg bottle of gas and £70 a week on petrol for the electric generator. The generator is not powerful enough to boil a kettle or run a washing machine so she must also spend £50 a week in the laundry to keep her children clean.

"We are at our wits' end," she said. "We wouldn't be here if we could get anywhere else to go – we've rung loads of Travellers, looked on websites, and asked the Gypsy council."

Other families insisted they also had nowhere else to go and stayed because they wanted their children to continue attending the local primary school, the only one in the country where Traveller pupils form a majority. Sheridan's mother, Mary Flynn, who has osteoporosis and suffers chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that has left her with a lung capacity "barely compatible with life" according to court medical evidence, has suffered another fracture since the eviction. "She is just breaking away," Sheridan said. "She's really gone downhill."

Although Sheridan and her mother own one of the legal pitches on Dale Farm she admitted it was looking "far fetched" that they would ever return. As obliged by the high court, Basildon council has returned electricity to the site – after four months. But the Travellers say no electricity company will reconnect them. In any case, the rubble makes it impossible to tow a caravan back on to the site.

Sheridan said she hoped that Jarab's visit – in which he apparently advised both sides to seek mediation – could herald her return to the negotiating table with Basildon council. "A lot of residents haven't moved away and are living amongst stagnant water and broken septic tanks but I would like to negotiate with Basildon about alternative sites," she said.

The Travellers have submitted applications for two alternative sites on nearby land. Another former site in the area from which Travellers were evicted is earmarked for new homes. Basildon council is now seeking the eviction of the Travellers living on the private road outside Dale Farm and Ball, the council leader, said it was "very disappointing" that the UN visit had been made public.

"The UN were very clear that their visit to Basildon should be confidential, and this has clearly been breached," he said. According to Ball, Jarab's visit was "not specific to Dale Farm" and they discussed "the future provision of sites across the country and changes to national policy".

Councils across the country have failed to claim £13m of £60m of government funding for new Traveller and Gypsy sites although the remaining £47m has now been allocated to proposals for 617 new pitches. Under the Localism Act, however, councils will have more powers to resist planning applications from Travellers, which are usually unpopular with local voters. According to Sheridan, the "knock-on effect" of the Dale Farm eviction has been anti-Traveller groups springing up across the country seeking to stop families identifying suitable sites. "We are more vilified than ever," she said.