Political suicide: housing Gypsy and Traveller communities

From the Guardian

For local authorities, Gypsies and Travellers can prove a political thorn in the side. Organisations representing Gypsy and Travellers are calling recent changes, which have seen the scrapping of regional targets alongside a lighter touch from central government, the "biggest back pedaling" on support and accommodation they had seen. In fact, they are so frustrated with the hiatus in new site provision that for the first time, more than 15 organisations have taken the unprecedented move of putting their differences aside to approach communities minister Andrew Stunell.

Chris Whitwell, director of Friends, Families and Travellers, says: "We wanted a commitment to engage and look into issues for future meetings … it's the first time we've come together as a co-ordinated group to speak in this unified way."

Meanwhile, councillors remain wary of the impact planning for new sites can have on their electability. The take-up of funds for new sites has been poor. Of £60m in Homes and Communities Agency funding up for grabs to 2015, only £46m has been bid for. More so, bids do not correlate to areas of highest need: Essex, Kent, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Surrey (the five counties with the most Travellers and 25% of the caravans) only got 4% of the money.

Michael Hargreaves, a planning adviser for the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain (ITMB), says: "Essex, which has most Travellers but also the highest level of conflict, got nearly nothing. There's a problem of local agenda resting on leadership – and it's the most reactionary of them all who are under the most pressure from residents to refuse sites."

Whitwell agrees. "Most local authorities don't have strong political leadership around this – they have proposed sites but people have marched past town halls and got these quashed … the likes of Hastings, Crawley and Southampton have all shown this, so even when grants are awarded, planning permission is difficult to get," he says.

Yet according to local government minister Bob Neill, top-down targets had already "failed to provide adequate land for travellers and caused tensions with the local settled community".

"People want to see fair play in the planning system, treating everyone fairly and equally," he says. "These new policies will allow local authorities to govern their own affairs while ensuring that both travellers and the settled communities get a fair deal through the planning system."

With the spotlight off regional structures and targets, along with the localism agenda leaving councils to assess need on their own doorsteps. Chris Johnson, director of Community Law Partnerships, says local authorities will now try to "reassess their need down". After all, who wants to see their electoral support evaporate?

But that may all be about to change according to Ric Pallister, a councillor who is running a series of awareness building workshops for the Local Government Association on this subject.

A few weeks ago, planning inspectors were alerted to flaws in Hull council's core strategy. They found serious failings with its Gypsy and Traveller assessments and found they also failed to identify a five-year rolling land supply for sites – a new requirement under the recent National Planning Policy Framework.

"This spells serious trouble for them," says Pallister, who also heads South Somerset district council. "Hull is the first one with their heads on the chopping block and all eyes will be on them. Their whole development plan is hinged on this [core strategy] and without it they can't do anything and risk future planning decisions being taken away from them."

Hull, along with other local authorities, has to provide a decent core strategy, and Pallister says this should act as a warning to any councillors tempted to shrug off their duties to Gypsy and Travellers.

But ITMB's Hargreaves says, in practice it's unlikely that councils will be too worried. "Under the old system, targets were defined at regional level; of which there were about nine.

"But now there are 290-odd local plans; with each local authority making its own assessment of need in its developmental plans," he says. "It makes it impossible for Traveller organisations to engage in all these processes. We don't have the resources to do that, and a lot of local authorities will run away with this," he adds.

The lack of sites is adding a further dimension in areas where space is a premium, explains Gill Brown, from the London Gypsy and Traveller Unit.

"For the first time [in London] we are seeing a whole generation of Travellers who have never lived on sites, but all their relatives are on the sites and that generation don't know who they are," he says.

To exacerbate the problem, "when local authorities do needs assessments, those in conventional housing who want to live on sites, do not get included," says Whitwell.

He says: "There are high levels of claustrophobia in housing, so they go back to finding a site … they find there are none or get fed-up with being evicted so try to get back into bricks and mortar, so it's a yo-yoing of the two."

According to one psychologist who worked alongside Dale Farm residents, Robin Jamieson, however, Travellers are not averse to living in bricks and mortar, so long as the architecture is sympathetic: "Specifically windows all round, so they can see the children on the site".

But for Gypsies, an option to be on the road and travelling will always be preferable. He explains that until we have grasped the fundamental differences between Travellers and Gypsies, understanding, yet alone solving the accommodation problem remains a long way off.