Leeds: £1 million plan to expand Traveller site - Yorkshire

From the Yorkshire Post

Council chiefs in Leeds are planning to expand Cottingley Springs Gypsy and Travellers’ camp following a year-long search for a new site.

Areas across the city were assessed before officials finally settled on extending Leeds’s only permanent Travellers’ site, which is off Gelderd Road.

Cottingley Springs currently has 41 pitches and it is proposed to create a further 12.

Funding is being provided by the Government, which earlier this year handed the council

a £1m grant to develop more Gypsy and Traveller pitches.

The council currently spends about £300,000 a year on legal and others costs to deal with unauthorised encampments.

The key aim of the proposal, which will be put to the council’s executive board next month, is to provide spaces for 12 Leeds-based Gypsy and Traveller families who are constantly moved on by the council.

Neil Evans, the council’s environment and neighbourhoods director, said: “We are not proposing to provide accommodation for families that are passing through Leeds.

“We are trying to accommodate about 12 travelling families that to all intents and purposes are Leeds families and we are in a cycle of eviction with them.

“It is not good for them and not good for the communities who find them turning up unplanned.”

He acknowledged that cases of unauthorised sites would still occur but was confident there would be fewer.

If the scheme is approved by the board and wins planning consent, work could get underway by late next year.

Since the search for a new site was announced there has been much speculation about which area would be chosen. Only last week the council had to deny land off Calverley Lane, Horsforth, had been selected.

All council land was considered and 87 sites were listed as available within the next 12 months. The list was whittled down to 35 and these were visited by planning and housing officers.

Mr Evans said all were rejected for a variety of reasons including size, cost and access problems. Some the council wanted to retain for affordable housing or other uses.

Helen Jones, of Leeds Gypsy and Travellers Exchange, said the suggestion that there was nowhere else in Leeds other than Cottingley Springs suitable for a Gypsy and Travellers’ site was appalling.

She added: “A Gypsy and Travellers’ site is affordable housing. Shops, schools and other facilities are too far away from Cottingley Springs and this proposal makes an existing problem even bigger.”