Dale Farm comes to DCLG

From Planning Resource

It may be a year on from the eviction of Travellers at Dale Farm in Essex but feelings are still running high.

Friday afternoon saw around 120 Travellers and protestors try to storm the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) building in central London.

The mass action was staged in an attempt to ‘evict’ communities secretary Eric Pickles, according to direct action group Traveller Solidarity.

Activists held 6ft caravan cut outs to occupy the space in front of the DCLG building while around 10 protesters scaled the scaffolding at the front of the building with banners reading ‘Fight for Sites’, ‘End All Evictions’ and ‘Dale Farm Fightback’.

Reports on Twitter suggested around seven people were arrested but the protestors were eventually dispersed.

Traveller Solidarity claims that protestors hold the DCLG responsible for ‘leading the attack on traveller rights’ by increasing eviction powers and slashing regional targets for site provision.

Oscar Farrell, who resisted the eviction at Dale Farm one year ago, said: “What is happening at Dale Farm isn’t just a local dispute – it is part of Eric Pickles’ attack on traveller communities. Traveller families all over the country are being evicted and left with nowhere else to go because there aren’t enough sites.”

But will Friday’s action will be enough to change Pickles’ approach? If his recent comments and a series of measures over the last year are anything to go by, it is unlikely.

At the Conservative party conference earlier this month the communities secretary showed no signs of toning down his tough stance, pledging to ‘stop caravans in their tracks’ with new instant ‘stop notices’.

He said that “drawn out cases like Dale Farm have brought the legal system into disrepute”.

His comments followed guidance he issued in August outlining the powers available to local authorities to prevent or remove illegal encampments.

And that came after revised planning guidance published by the DCLG in March, giving local councils more powers over planning Travellers pitches rather than using central targets.

At the time the Council of Europe warned that it meant that many local authorities will plan for fewer residential pitches than they would have done in the past and accused the government of failing to safeguard the human rights of the UK’s Gypsy and Traveller population.

It’s clear that whatever action Pickles takes on cracking down on illegal encampments the issue of making sure there are enough legal sites for Gypsies and Travellers will not just go away.

Statistics produced by the department in May showed a rise in the total number of Gypsy and Traveller caravans in England in January 2012 to almost 18,750, about 400 more than the previous January. But the number of caravans on unauthorised sites had fallen. So where are they going?

Now that there are no central targets for site provision it raises the question what kind of monitoring there will be to show what the national picture is.

A DCLG spokesman said the government is providing £60 million of funding to help support authorised pitches for Travellers.

He added: “The public want to see fair play – with planning rules being upheld and action being taken against those who try to cheat the system.

“The government has already changed the law to tackle abuses of the planning system, and we propose to strengthen the law further to allow councils to stop unauthorised sites as soon as they happen, to prevent future drawn-out cases like Dale Farm.”

But if a year on from Dale Farm tensions are still emerging my guess is we may well see more direct action of the kind seen on Friday.