Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the potential implications for his policies of the inaccessibility of land owned by travellers when local authorities carry out statutory counting of caravans on traveller sites; and what assessment he has made of the potential impact of inaccessible land on the reliability of the figures published in his Department’s Traveller Count statistics.

My Department recognises that access to traveller sites may not always be possible. This fact is reflected in the guidance provided to local planning authorities when carrying out the Traveller Caravan Count, which advises that such sites should still be included in the submitted figures, and an estimated count included in the total(s). Local planning authorities are required to indicate in the submitted data whether they were able to access sites in order to carry out the count.