Gypsies and Travellers and Local Communities

Robert Syms Excerpts

Monday 9th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

My constituents in Poole are reasonable and tolerant people—they believe in live and let live—but every summer, about the time of the Dorset steam fair, several groups descend on the town. We are not blessed with fields and farms, but we have parks and public open spaces, and quite often these groups illegally occupy them by causing criminal damage. The police do not take action because they do not have confidence in the law at the moment and tend to avoid getting embroiled in such situations. It then falls to the local authority, Poole Borough Council, which has a choice: either it takes legal action, which is long and imprecise and, if the group it is taking action against moves a few hundred yards or to another site, a total waste of time and money; or it negotiates with the groups, providing toilets, bags, some help and support, and sometimes water, in the hope that they will leave after 10 days or two weeks.

Whatever the council does, my constituents get upset, because they have to pay the bill for the clean-up at the end of the occupation. In the meantime, they are quite often denied the use of a park, play area, facility or playground for their children and grandchildren. They get very angry about that, and they get even more angry when they phone the police and get excuses. They phone the local council, which spends most of its time explaining what it cannot do, rather than what it can do, and they then phone all the local councillors, who helpfully tell them to contact the Member of Parliament.

Eventually, my constituents get around to me, and I say that when I have had meetings with Ministers, I have made the point that sections 61 and 62 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 do not actually work. We need to do something about that. In the past, Ministers have announced that they would have a consultation. The last time I talked to a Minister—my right hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis)—was six or seven years ago, and there was a consultation at that point. Although I welcome such a consultation, what is necessary for public confidence is action.

Relations between Travellers and the public would be much better if there was a precise way of dealing with the problem. Then we could get to the root of the problem which, as many hon. Members have said, is about education and health in the Traveller community. What we need is to give confidence to the police and the local authority so that they can take action efficiently and effectively, without too much cost, so that they are happy, my constituents are happy and we can start to deal with the nub of the problem, which is the under-achievement and so on in the Traveller community.

What we have at the moment is a total and utter mess. Confidence in law and order drops, confidence in the council drops, confidence in councillors drops and confidence in the Member of Parliament drops. The reality is that people feel very dissatisfied. In a world where it is sometimes difficult to persuade people to turn out to vote, if someone is behaving antisocially at the bottom of their garden and we cannot do anything about it, they ask, “What’s the point?”

I hope that the Minister hears the message from today. First, we need a consultation which will receive plenty of advice—we have heard some good advice from colleagues today. Secondly, we need a timescale, because we do not want the issue to disappear into the Department for Communities and Local Government and never come out. Thirdly, as we have the joys of a two-year Session—we will not have a Queen’s Speech because of Brexit—we will have time to get legislation through. There is bound to be a criminal justice Bill, so let us use the opportunity and legislate.