Tory leader Michael Howard has made the right of gypsies a pre-election issue. Yet lawyers warn that politicians do not contribute anything of value to the debate and it is up to local councils to face their legal responsibilities, reports Jon Robins


‘What gypsies are getting away with must be stopped,’ thundered Robert Kilroy-Silk, former television presenter who now has his own political party called Veritas. The legal rights of gypsies and travellers have been put on the pre-election political agenda since the Conservative leader Michael Howard identified it as one of his party’s ‘dog-whistle’ issues.


Last week, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary in which the Codona family, who lived in an encampment in Bedfordshire, was subjected to Mr Kilroy-Silk’s company for four nights. The Romany family did not appear to be getting away with much. In fact, they were unceremoniously booted off the land that they owned, but had been denied permission permanently to occupy, after having lived there for eight years.


Mr Kilroy-Silk has written and spoken about the issue of travellers many times, insisting that while there is nothing wrong with alternative lifestyles, they should not be pursued at the expense of other people’s lives and property.


As far as lawyers on both sides of the debate are concerned, the reawakened attentions of politicians are not to be welcomed. Mr Howard rounded on gypsies when he said he did not believe in ‘special rules for special interest groups’ and proposed to scrap the right available to everyone to make retrospective planning applications, amend or repeal the Human Rights Act, and criminalise intentional trespass.


‘It is outrageous, especially given the way that his government with, of course, him as home secretary, did away with the Caravan Sites Act 1968,’ comments Marc Willers, a barrister at Two Garden Court chambers, London, who specialises in acting for gypsies and travellers.


Mr Willers is referring to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which ditched the statutory duty on local authorities to provide gypsy sites imposed under the 1968 Act. ‘Frankly, that deserves an apology rather than any swingeing changes to the Human Rights Act which appear to me to be just totally discriminatory,’ the barrister adds.


Louise Humphreys is the planning lawyer at Surrey Heath Borough Council and, as such, she spends 90% of her time dealing with two unauthorised encampments in Chobham. Her job changed overnight when the first site was set up in February 2003, much to the outrage of locals. ‘For the first couple of weeks, the whole of the council’s chief executive department, that’s about 15 to 20 officers, spent their time simply answering the phones from people contacting us about what was going on,’ she recalls. The lawyer reckons that she has personally spent some 3,000 hours on issues relating to the sites.


Ms Humphreys is also unimpressed by the populist forays of politicians into this fraught area. ‘I dislike the issue becoming a political football because that doesn’t help anyone,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t help the council and it doesn’t help the travellers to [have their concerns] booted between parties. It really needs cross-party work to put forward something that the council can work with but also the travellers can work with as well.’


The Community Law Partnership in Birmingham runs the travellers’ advice team and about a third of the firm’s work is offering advice on planning, evictions from unauthorised encampments and official sites, as well as homelessness and other issues. The five fee-earner strong team also runs the travellers’ telephone helpline, which is funded by the Legal Services Commission.


According to partner Chris Johnson, the legal problems of his clients go ‘back into the mists of time’ but can more recently be dated to the closure of commons by the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960. The government attempted to redress this problem with the 1968 Act by imposing a duty on certain local authorities to provide sites. By the time Mr Howard introduced his 1994 legislation, 35% of local authorities had made such arrangements. ‘The problem had been the failure of central government to use its enforcement powers to ensure that local authorities complied with the duty,’ the solicitor says.


The legislation was accompanied by a circular that exhorted gypsies and travellers to set up their own sites. However, it is now reckoned that 90% of applications from the travelling community for planning permission are refused by local authorities, compared to 20% for the settled community. ‘At the time of the introduction of the 1994 Act, the Labour Party stated that the real aim of the government was to force them into housing,’ says Mr Johnson.


He argues that this view was apparently endorsed by the fact the Act also introduced ‘Draconian eviction powers’ for both police and local authorities.


What does he make of the media’s depiction of traveller communities as lawless gypsies creating havoc in communities? ‘A minority of the community undoubtedly may cause problems – just as in any community,’ he says. ‘No doubt that is to be expected when the community as a whole is treated as and depicted as a group of latter-day outlaws.’


Mr Johnson’s firm also recently came in for some flak from the tabloid press after the Department for Constitutional Affairs reported that £313,350 of public funding since 2002 had been spent, as the Daily Express put it, to run ‘a telephone hotline telling gypsies how to avoid eviction from illegal camps’.


Mr Johnson suggests his firm ‘must be doing a good job’ if the press is so against it, adding that media reporting is generally inaccurate and does not get to grips with the law. He emphasises that his firm would never tell people to move to land without permission, but advises them if they do.


The usual concerns of locals about anti-social behaviour took a more serious turn in Chobham last month when a married father-of-five, Paul Cash, was murdered on one site, which has been home to about 125 travellers. It was subject to a planning inquiry that could lead to its closure. ‘The land isn’t suitable for any form of development and certainly not a gypsy caravan site,’ says Ms Humphreys. ‘It is green-belt land, on a flood plain and a designated natural conservation site. It has every kind of restriction on planning that one could possibly imagine.’


The solicitor contends that there needs to be a greater recognition that gypsies and travellers need sites. ‘Personally, I think we should go back to the point where councils are obliged to fund sites for travelling people – all councils – whether transit or permanent sites or a combination of both,’ she says.


The Chobham sites are owned in whole or part by their occupants. The Law Lords will soon have to decide on whether gypsies camped on local authority land without permission in Leeds can fight eviction by arguing that it infringes their human rights. Ashley Underwood QC, representing Leeds City Council, which last month successfully overturned the appeal, told the judges after they gave permission for the case to go to the House of Lords that delay was ‘liable to stop all possession proceedings dead in every county court in the country’.


Keith Lomax, a partner at Leeds firm Davies Gore Lomax, has been acting for gypsies and travellers for about 13 years. He is acting for the Maloney family, whose defence is that possession proceedings would infringe their rights under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence).


He reckons much of the press coverage of the case has been ‘completely untrue [and] ridiculous’. One newspaper report started as follows: ‘Only the Law Lords can stop anarchy coming to open spaces right across Leeds.’ The Community Legal Partnership reports that its clients are being evicted on ‘a daily basis’.


‘Even if there’s the outcome which I hope there will be, it wouldn’t actually block possession orders,’ explains Mr Lomax. ‘All that such an outcome would do is require local authorities to take individual human circumstances into account. There would be plenty of situations where it would be plain to a local authority that, even if they were to take into account everything, the balance would weigh sufficiently on their side.’


Finally, after what Mr Johnson reckons to be ‘an amazing array’ of reviews and reports, Labour introduced the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, which places an obligation on local authorities to identify possible locations for gypsy sites, but falls short of a statutory obligation to provide them. Last November, the House of Commons’ local government and planning select committee reported that more than 3,500 gypsies and travellers had no legal place to park their caravans.


Mr Johnson maintains that the government, despite a recommendation from that committee supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers, the National Farmers Union and some residents, is currently ‘fighting shy of reintroducing the duty [to provide sites], presumably mindful of the upcoming general election’.


The solicitor points out that there was cross-party consensus on the 2004 legislation and reckons that the Conservatives have now ‘broken ranks presumably for electoral gain and jumped on the press bandwagon’. He predicts that the ‘only logical conclusion’ of this approach is that gypsies and travellers will have to go into housing and be ‘assimilated’ or that they will have to leave the country.


‘This is really a proposal to introduce a quiet and relatively sanitised form of ethnic cleansing,’ Mr Johnson says. ‘It appears that gypsies and travellers, in common with asylum seekers, remain a group that what amounts to discrimination and prejudice can be aimed at. If you take certain press headlines and substitute the word “black” or “Jew” for the word “gypsy” or “traveller”, this becomes very apparent.’




Jon Robins is a freelance journalist