Gypsies and Travellers and Local Communities

Paul Beresford Excerpts

Monday 9th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

That is discrimination, Mr Deputy Speaker! I will have to talk extremely quickly.

I thank the Minister for offering us this consultation and for expanding it to take in ideas and solutions. Surrey, and Mole Valley in particular, has had considerable and unpleasant experience of Travellers. Most are not Romani Gypsies. Most have very strong Irish accents. My right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) might have given us an explanation of why. For simplicity, I divide them into three groups—he divided them into two—the first being those who use legitimate sites. They are law-abiding. They utilise the education service; they go to schools. They use the national health service. They are part of our community.

The second group are those who buy land on the green belt, squat on it, bring community disharmony and exhibit aggressive abuse of the planning system, acting as if, while it applies to the settled community, they are above it. I have two particularly notorious sites in the Mole Valley. Both are on green belt and both groups abuse the planning system by making retrospective applications. We then get appeal, generally at the last minute, followed by reapplication, followed by rejection, followed by re-application, followed by refusal, followed by appeal, and so on. Both groups blatantly use the presence of children as reasons to reject the legal orders obtained by local authorities for their removal from the sites.

Relationships with local communities are fractious at best and often punctuated with verbal threats and threats to the surrounding communities. I have received a few myself. One site is on inherited land. The other was bought with cash, from whatever source. At the weekend, people arrived with caravans, trucks, bulldozers, loads of rubble, piping, electrical wiring and so on. By the end of Sunday, they had installed an electricity supply and tapped into a water supply, whether legally or not. Electric gates on pillars suitable for a garish stately home were put in. Then the nonsense started: hopeless applications, refusals, appeals, more refusals, more appeals. In the case of the gates, this has been continuing for 14 years, and looks set to continue for several more at least. We now have a review, and I ask the Minister to look at that case in particular. I would be delighted to come along and explain to him the difficulties.

The third group consists of the true Travellers on whom we have been concentrating this evening, who are an expensive menace to my local authorities, parish councils and farmers. This year Surrey has been particularly plagued by groups who descend on open land that contains community grounds, school grounds, farmland and so on. Fortunately—I am a member of the National Farmers Union—the farming community is becoming quite adept at prevention.

Those groups have been taking anything between one and 30 caravans, plus associated vehicles. They descend on the site and squat. Civil action to remove them can take between days and weeks, and is very expensive, especially for some of Surrey’s little parish councils. When they have eventually been removed by expensive bailiffs, the sites are generally disgusting, featuring everything from food waste to children’s soiled nappies and worse. Returning them to a decent condition involves added expense.

As I have said, I should be delighted to visit the Minister, with one or two of the helpers who have to deal with all this, to advise him on how we feel that the law should be changed. I am particularly in favour of the change in the law suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois), who proposed that we should adopt the Irish example. We should extend it by not only making this a criminal offence, but giving the police the power to require the people whom they approach on the sites to prove who they are. The biggest problems for the police at present are the giving of “Mickey Mouse” names and the fact that enforcement is extremely difficult. I should love to come and see the Minister—and he is faintly nodding, so I will take that as a yes.