Letters from Dale Farm families highlights discrimination in the system - Essex

From the Travellers' Solidarity Network

In October, Basildon Council’s ‘Traveller Project Team‘ sent letters to the families living on Oak Lane, requesting for a considerable amount of information on their circumstances. No support was offered to provide this by a Traveller Project Team who have never even visited Dale Farm to speak to anyone. This is the families’ response to the letters…

Dear Traveller Project Team,

Subject:

Your letter dated 26th October, entitled ‘TOWN AND COUNTRY PLANNING ACT 1990
BREACH OF PLANNING CONTROL – TRACKSIDE ENCAMPMENT OFF OAK
LANE CRAYS HILL BILLERICAY ESSEX’.

What you have asked us to do:
- You have asked us to give you information about our families, including information about our health, and our children’s education.
- You have asked us to send letters to our GPs and to our children’s schools, asking them to provide you with personal information about our health care needs, and about how often our children attend school, how well they do at school and about their special educational needs.
- You have asked us to return all this information to you, including information to be supplied by our doctors, and by the school, by the 23rd November, 2012.

Your letters say that you want to consider this information before deciding what, if any, action to take to enforce compliance with planning notices.

Consideration of our health and educational needs
We are very keen for you to consider our health care needs and the educational needs of our children before you decide what action to take. All the families who live temporarily at Oak Lane were made homeless by Basildon Council in October 2011 following the forced eviction at Dale Farm. We stay here so that our children can remain at their local school, and so that we can continue to access medical care. Many of us have acute and/or chronic diseases and need regular support from local specialist health care teams.

Difficulties completing the form
As you know, most of the adults in our community are unable to read or write. This means we have had to find help to read the letters you sent, and we need help also to complete the forms. There is not enough support locally available to us to complete the forms you have sent us by the deadline you have given of 23rd November, 2012. Some of us have tried, but most people have not had enough support to fully understand what is required, or by when, or to complete the forms and send off letters. We have not had time to cooperate as we would wish.

What the council suggested
The Council suggests that we try to get support to complete the questionnaires from either our solicitor, the SOS bus, or from the Project Traveller Team. The SOS visits on one day each week, and is there to give much needed health checks. There is not enough time during these visits for all the families on Oak Lane to get support from the SOS bus to complete the forms you have sent us. It is also impossible for a single solicitor to assist all the families by telephone.

What we need
We very much need support from the Traveller Project Team to complete these forms. Since we cannot read or write we need this support to be in person. As there are so many of us, and because there are many mothers with young children, and elderly and infirm relatives who need constant support, we need people from the Team Project Team to visit us at Oak Lane so that we can go through these forms in person, without having to make complicated, difficult, and for some quite impossible, child and adult care arrangements. Without this help we cannot complete these forms and certainly not by the deadline of 23rd November.

So far no one from the Traveller Project Team has visited us at Oak Lane. We do not know who is in the Traveller Project Team. Unfortunately our only knowledge of the Traveller Project Team is that this is the signature used on all the enforcement notices we have received. Some people who have rung the council and asked to speak with the Traveller Project Team have been put through to the Enforcement Team. This will make it hard for us to provide sensitive personal information, because it is hard to trust that it will be properly recorded and acted on, or properly considered by people who clearly want to evict us, but regardless, we very much need the council’s help in order to provide the information you have asked for.

We would be grateful if the Traveller Project Team could arrange to visit the site in order to support families with this process.

Responses from doctors and schools
We do not think it is reasonable to expect doctors and schools to complete the information you have asked for by the deadline you have given. There are very many of us who have the same local doctors and with children at the same local schools and you have asked for complex information, which means they will have to provide a lot of different information in a very short time.

The letters you asked us to give to our doctors and to our children’s schools
Many of us did not feel comfortable sending the letters you gave us to give to our doctors and our children’s schools because you say that we are ‘in breach of criminal law’. As you know we suffer a great deal of prejudice locally. Sending letters saying we are breaking criminal law is likely to increase bad feeling towards us, when we need greater understanding of our history, culture, and current circumstances. Without this understanding, we cannot begin to overcome the prejudice and inequality we experience. We have not been found guilty of breaching criminal law in a court and this is an unpalatable allegation.

Current circumstances
We are at Oak Lane because we have nowhere else to go. Preventing us from settling and placing us under constant threat of eviction causes us great stress and makes it impossible for us to improve our communities’ life circumstances. Constant accommodation insecurity is an enormous emotional strain. The conditions we are now living in, without proper washing or toilet facilities, or access to a stable electricity supply, increase our stress and ill health. Evictions and poor living conditions which increase the level of physical sickness and stress also interferes with our children’s education; the children at Oak Lane have experienced very many illnesses since living on Oak Lane after the eviction from Dale Farm last year.

The council has duties of care towards us as citizens with equal rights to health and educational support, and also as an ethnic minority community which experiences racism and suffers disproportionately from ill health and poor educational attainment.

More time
Completing the forms provided by the council is going to take us more time. Can you please confirm that in light of these issues, the deadline will be extended, and additional support provided to us on site to help us complete this process.

Yours faithfully,
on behalf of the Oak Lane Families