Coun Tracey Simpson-Laing responds to residents' Traveller site questions - Yorkshire

From the Press

Plans for a new Travellers’ site and a Showpeople’s yard have met with fierce protests. A senior councillor today answers some of the questions local residents have been asking. MIKE LAYCOCK reports.

AT public meetings and on the internet – and probably wherever two or three people are gathered together in villages to east and west of York – the same sort of questions keep cropping up...

They include: “Why does the council want to build a new Traveller’s site and a Showpeople’s yard?” or “Why does it want to put them at Dunnington and Knapton respectively? And “Who says York needs any more such sites?”

The questions, and a great deal of anger, have been generated by proposals in York’s draft Local Plan, currently out to public consultation.

But Coun Tracey Simpson-Laing, cabinet member for housing, would like to put the record straight.

“The council doesn’t want to build the new sites,” she says. “It’s very unlikely we would have the funding available anyway.

“Not all Travellers’ sites are built and run by the council. There’s one in the Fulford area that is privately owned that has been operating without problem for decades.

“And these new locations haven’t been proposed by the council – they are in the draft plan because the owners of the land have ticked a box saying they would be willing for them to be considered for such uses when we invited them to submit details of sites that they consider could be suitable.

“Unless the sites are at great risk of flooding, or are perhaps in an area of Special Scientific Interest, the council does not have any choice but to suggest in the draft Local Plan they should be allocated for such a use.”

But does she feel the sites are appropriate?

She says she can’t say because councillors like her, who are involved in the planning committee, could prejudice their position and prevent them taking part in decisions if a planning application was later submitted.

But who says any new sites are needed?

She says the need was identified in the North Yorkshire Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Assessment of 2008 and a North Yorkshire Accommodation Require-ments of Showmen report of 2009, agreed to by York council, which had been extrapolated by officers for an additional ten years.

She urged everyone to respond to the council’s consultation exercise. To see detailed documents, go to http://www.york.gov.uk/info/200396/planning_policy/428/planning_policy or go to your library or West Offices.