Home to roost

Four-year-old Joseph rides his bike around his family’s pitch at Brooks Green Gypsy and Traveller site in Norwich. In September he’ll be starting at the same local school as his brother Dude, six.

Dude - real name William - is getting on well there. Now that he’s living on a permanent site developed by Broadlands Housing Association and South Norfolk Council, he’ll gain the kind of education previous generations of his community missed out on.

As for three-year-old Sonny, his place, for the time being, is at home. He loves the chickens his family breed as pets, laughs at his mum Vicky Buckley, 24, as he picks one up and toddles around with it expertly clutched under his arm like a handbag.

The family sleeps in a smart-looking caravan, but on this site they also rent what’s known as a ‘day room’ - a bit like a bungalow, with a kitchen, bathroom and living room, but no bedrooms. From inside come the cries of the boys’ doll-like eight-month-old sister, Cherie-Rose.

The children’s father, Billy Mitchell, is busy fixing one of the chicken coops that line one side of the pitch. Ms Buckley, however, is happy to chat and recalls how the family stayed here before, about two years ago, ‘before it was a proper site’. This spot has always been tolerated land - a place where Gypsies and Travellers can stay without being ordered to move on.

In November, armed with a short-term tenancy agreement, the family moved onto the new and improved Brooks Green - which has electricity, running water, proper drainage and surfaced pitches.

It’s a relief to be here says Ms Buckley, who explains that other members of her community are constantly on the move because there’s nowhere they can stop.

Pressing need
There are an estimated 300,000 Gypsies and Travellers in Britain. While some have moved into houses, around one in four of those who live in caravans do not have a legal place on which to park, says the Race Equality Foundation. Researchers at the University of Salford, meanwhile, estimate that there’s a shortfall of more than 5,000 pitches in England alone.

Despite all this, the coalition government slashed £30 million from its Gypsy and Traveller site grant as part its first raft of cuts amounting to £230 million, in May.

The previous government had made £97 million available for the development of Gypsy and Traveller sites between 2008 and 2011. From last year onwards, the funding was to be managed by the Homes and Communities Agency. Of the £32 million budget for the financial year 2009/10, £15 million was given to the national affordable housing programme instead of Gypsy and Traveller sites, and of the £17 million left, only
£1.5 million was spent. The 2010/11 budget has now been cut completely, meaning all that’s left is the £15.5 million that wasn’t allocated last year.

Under the Labour government, councils were set targets for site provision to be met by 2011. These targets were co-ordinated at regional level, but now the coalition government has scrapped regional spatial strategies meaning local authorities will not be under pressure from central government to provide a certain number of pitches.

Indeed, a letter sent by the Communities and Local Government department to local authority planning heads in July stated that councils are best placed to assess the right level of site provision.

During the same month, think tank the Local Government Information Unit published a briefing called Gypsies and Travellers: impact of changes in the planning system. It reminded councillors and civil servants that they have responsibilities towards Gypsy and Traveller communities. ‘This is an issue that must not fall to the bottom of the pile, so storing problems for the future,’ it stated.

Local authorities spend around £18 million a year of taxpayers’ money evicting Gypsies and Travellers from unauthorised sites. These costs could be significantly reduced if councils invested in legitimate sites, states the Equality and Human Rights Commission in its report Gypsies and Travellers: Simple Solutions for Living Together, published in March last year.

Authorised site benefits
‘It’s more expensive in the long run,’ explains Jacqueline Bolton, programme development manager for community cohesion at the Ormiston Children and Families Trust, a regional charity that assisted some the Gypsy and Traveller families now living at Brooks Green with their applications to get onto the site.

First there’s the cost of constantly moving people around, she says, and then there’s the price of the fall-out from this - socially excluded families, children with no qualifications, people living with poor health. ‘Travellers live in unhealthy places, dangerous places - often they have no access to health services,’ she adds.

Michael Newey, group chief executive of Broadland Housing Group says he had hoped that Brooks Green - which has 25 families on its waiting list - ‘might be the first of a new wave of provision for a group that society too often wants to marginalise and even demonise. Instead it might turn out to be an example of what could have been done, but wasn’t,’ he laments.

The eight-pitch Brooks Green site was developed with £1.1 million funding from the CLG accessed via the East of England Development Agency, which was abolished in June. The families there, four of which are related, rent their pitch from Broadland Housing Association - they have signed a tenancy agreement, and must pay their bills, just as any other tenant would.

The land was handed over free-of-charge by its former owner Barry Brooks, whose family had let Gypsies and Travellers stay there for generations. ‘There’s a long history of Gypsy and Traveller movement across Norfolk,’ sums up Tony Cooke, housing standards manager at South Norfolk Council.

Betsy Mitchell, the matriarch of Brooks Green, says her family has ‘waited many years’ for it to be built. ‘We’ve lived in this area for over 10 years,’ she continues.

Ms Mitchell doesn’t want her photo taken; she’s busy looking after her sister who’s paying a visit with some of her nine children. Her dayroom is packed with at least half a dozen women and their offspring. The men, meanwhile, are somewhere outside.

This site gives Ms Mitchell ‘the best of both worlds’, she says. ‘I still live like a Roman [Romany Gypsy]. I’ve still got my caravan.’ The only downside, she says, is having to keep her horses in a nearby field rather than on her pitch.

Families on the site are allowed to travel for up to six months of the year, and for up to three months at a time. Their culture is based around having the freedom to move, explains South Norfolk’s Mr Cooke. However, for some, travelling will be restricted to visiting relatives, attending social events and festivals such as horse fairs.

A model for the future
Broadland Housing Group’s Mr Newey feels that the future of sites like Brooks Green is being jeopardised by the coalition government’s spending cuts, but others insist that the Labour government’s grant achieved little anyway.

‘Significant funds were spent on renovating existing sites instead of building new ones,’ says the LGIU’s report - and as for targets set by regional quangos, most councils fell short.

In fact, the Conservative Party’s open source planning green paper, published in February, seems to advocate the very system in operation at Brooks Green. We will ‘reform the system of Traveller site funding to councils so [they] are properly compensated for new sites and require travellers to make a contribution to the appropriate costs of services on sites,’ it reads.

Although no details are given, presumably this means the cost of the site and services are recoverable through rent, council tax payments and reductions in the cost of enforcement.

On 10 June, in response to a parliamentary question about the government’s cuts to the last HCA funding round in the House of Commons, communities secretary Eric Pickles announced that an incentive scheme will be introduced to encourage local authorities to have Gypsy and Traveller sites.

Conservative policies contained promises to local authorities that would allow them to take a harder line against Gypsies and Travellers parked on unauthorised sites. In the same green paper, the party says it will provide councils with ‘stronger enforcement powers to tackle unauthorised development and illegal trespass’.

The document also includes plans to make an amendment to the Human Rights Act, which, it argues, has ‘made it more difficult and expensive to evict trespassers from private and public property, and has overridden planning law by allowing Travellers to go ahead with unauthorised development’.

The paper goes on to state that a Conservative government would ‘introduce a legal framework to enable councils to remove unauthorised dwellings […] built on land which is owned by travellers and land which is not’.

When Gypsies and Travellers buy land and park a caravan there without receiving planning permission, the Conservatives promise to enable councils to take stronger action. The green paper states that the party it will ‘limit the concept of retrospective planning permission’, which it describes as ‘another route by which the planning system has been abused by those seeking to use unauthorised sites’.

Chris Johnson, a partner working within the Traveller advice team at law firm The Community Law Partnership, says the coalition government’s actions so far have been ‘disastrous’ for Gypsies and Travellers. ‘It is in danger of ruining all the progress that has been made,’ he states.

‘The planning circular issued by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in January 2006 marked a sea change, and the evidence was that permissions for new sites and creation of new local authority sites was slowly starting on an upward curve,’ he says.

Now that the coalition government has swept this guidance away, fewer pitches will be built, continues Mr Johnson. ‘History has shown that, without some kind of central government oversight, most local authorities will not advance site provision and will avoid any duties or obligations. Mr Pickles really ought to know this.’

There are, however, some farsighted local authorities that, in the absence of demands from Westminster, are pushing ahead with the development of Gypsy and Traveller sites.

Long-term vision
Nine local authorities in Dorset, for example, are preparing a document showing the need for Gypsy and Traveller sites. ‘If you don’t have proper planning provision, you can end up with unauthorised sites,’ says Robert Gould, Dorset council’s cabinet member for environment.

‘Neighbours can get very concerned about potential sites,’ says Mr Gould, but he believes that tackling provision for Gypsies and Travellers now will offer better ‘long term better value’ than ‘putting things to one side and hoping it will be alright’.

At South Norfolk, meanwhile, Mr Cooke plans to ‘mainstream’ the allocation of pitches into the local authority’s choice-based lettings scheme, ‘so it just becomes part of the day job’.

The local authority is going to treat Gypsies and Travellers just like everyone else, and Brooks Green’s Ms Mitchell for one is having to adjust to this idea - she’s still getting her head around the prospect of having no control over who her neighbours are. Pitches on the site are allocated in much the same way as social housing, with a local connection being important. ‘At the moment, this is working lovely. It’s good that everybody knows and trusts each other,’ says Ms Mitchell. She doesn’t want ‘troublemakers’ moving onto the site.

‘You get some who pull up on sites and make them look a state and it’s just a waste of time,’ agrees Ms Buckley. ‘Then again, you get people who stay there and look after their place.’

All in all, she concludes, the more authorised pitches there are, the better. ‘It’s not nice living by the side of the road.’

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