Ministers to unveil crackdown on illegal Travellers' sites

From The Telegraph

The rules will ban new Traveller settlements on greenbelt land and stop councils from issuing compulsory purchase orders of private land to create new sites for such groups.

The coalition will also close a loophole exploited by a minority of Travellers who apply for planning permission retrospectively, having already illegally established themselves on someone else’s land.

Ministers will axe targets that oblige local authorities to create a certain number of pitches for travellers. In the future, local authorities will be allowed to determine how many Travellers sites they offer.

The new regulations will take effect from the beginning of April, but councils will be able to harness the new framework when taking enforcement action against illegal sites that have been established for years.

However, the government’s new stance may alarm Liberal Democrat members of the Coalition and concern European bureaucrats who have previously raised concerns about how Britain treats Travellers.

With the National Trust and other groups concerned that the Government’s planning reforms will inflict a building boom on the British countryside, Eric Pickles, the local government minister, is expected to argue that the robust new stance on unauthorised Travellers’ settlements shows the Coalition’s determination to protect rural areas.

Mr Pickles is said to believe that Labour gave all travellers a bad name by failing to clamp down on illegal sites. It is understood he will argue that Labour’s approach to the travelling community harmed community cohesion and undermined public confidence in the planning system.

Since 2000 there has been a fourfold increase in the number of unlawful development by travelling communities which have been “tolerated” by local authorities.

Ministers privately blame guidance published in 2006 by John Prescott, Labour’s deputy prime minister, for a sharp rise in unauthorised building by some groups of travellers. These recommendations to local authorities allowed green belt sites to be built on if there was “a specific, identified need for a Gypsy and Traveller site”.

That passage has been deleted from the new guidance to be published on Tuesday. The new version will say: “Inappropriate development is harmful to the Green Belt and should not be approved Traveller sites (temporary or permanent) in the Green Belt are inappropriate development.”

Mr Prescott’s guidance also gave the green light for councils to compulsory purchase sites for Travellers, stating that: “local authorities can identify specific sites and make land available ... Authorities should also consider whether it might be appropriate to exercise their compulsory purchase powers to acquire an appropriate site”.

This passage has also been removed from the reworked guidance, which will also include a new statement that ministers hope will offer better protection to the countryside from Traveller sites: “Local planning authorities should strictly limit new Traveller site development in open countryside.”

Four years ago Epping Forest Council threatened to compulsory purchase land as a “last resort” to cope with increasing demand from Travellers. Eleanor Laing, the local Tory MP, described the policy as comparable to the “worst excesses of Communist dictatorships”.

The Council of Europe’s Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities has taken a close interest in how Britain treats Travellers and other minority groups.

In early 2011 the committee’s members visited Dale Farm, at Crays Hill in Essex, which until it was cleared later in the year was Britain’s largest illegal Travellers camp. Basildon Council, the local authority responsible for the site, has said the cost of clearing the unauthorised site may have cost taxpayers more than £21 million over more than ten years.

see also:

The Express - Ban on rural Gypsy camps ‘harmful’

The Daily Mail - Steer clear of the Green Belt: Travellers told to stay away from land to prevent Dale Farm fiasco


24Dash - New planning policy bans Travellers from Green Belt

The Irish Times - Halting sites ban on greenbelt lands

Kirkwells' Planning Blog - Gypsies and Travellers