Travellers leave Great Harwood site following eviction threat - Lancashire

From the Lancashire Telegraph

TRAVELLERS camped on spare ground in Great Harwood packed up and left yesterday under threat of eviction.

The campers, who had rolled a total of eight campervans and caravans onto council-owned land off Shaftesbury Avenue nearly two weeks ago, had been served with a possession order ordering them to leave.

But they remained there until yesterday afternoon - past the deadline - and police and bailiffs joined council representatives as they were told to get off the land immediately.

The group packed up their belongings and picked up their litter before leaving voluntarily.

The Travellers, believed to be of Irish origin, said they came from Blackburn and had nowhere else to go.

Mary Collins, 30, said a nearby resident was washing and drying some of the group’s clothes.

“We don’t choose to live like this,” she said. “Who would have three kiddies living like this? Let the council house me, I’m on the waiting list.

“We’ve nowhere to go. There’s no transit sites, there are no permanent sites and there’s no house for me.

“We’ll go onto the next piece of council land because we don’t want to cause the police bother by going onto private property as we have done in the past.”

Under the terms of the possession order, the Travellers cannot return to the same patch of land for three months.

Hyndburn Borough councillor Clare Pritchard denied the Travellers had nowhere to go.

She said: “We have adequate provision for Travellers in the borough. We have transient pitches in Huncoat that aren’t full so they have there to go.

“We will always take proactive to illegal encampments in Hyndburn. We have a set criteria to deal with them and we will always do so in a robust manner.”

Hyndburn MP Graham Jones praised the council for its zero-tolerance approach to illegal Travellers but said the Government should introduce tougher measures to give local authorities more power.