HSG9 Gypsies, Travellers & Travelling Show People
Our strategy for accommodating Gypsies and Travellers seems to ensure that no party is satisfied.
It has become clear, as we try to include the required pitches in the new estates, that integration is desired neither by the travellers themselves, nor the developers, nor the estate residents.
We therefore are in danger of working out our policies based on a broad aspirational “desire” for integration, when the avoidance of this is the very thing that drives the travelling community to travel.
Further, developers know full well that pitches adjacent to homes reduces the value of those homes, and residents do not want to be placed next to travellers for the same reason and for social reasons.
There has to be a better solution than to bring into our Local Plan the very scenario that nobody wants.
This policy, and the insertion of the pitch clauses in the development site proposals, should be comprehensively reconsidered.
The management and “policing” of traveller sites should also be incorporated into policy. Private sale of the pitches will almost certainly lead to the sort of problems well known in the past. There should also be careful independent monitoring of the travelling behaviours of the occupants, bearing in mind that “persons who have ceased to travel permanently” no longer qualify in national policy.
BDBC’s Gypsy, Traveller and Travelling Show People Accommodation Assessment talks of surveying Travelling Communities, but contains no useful data at all, just a list of questions asked. It is absolutely key that we should find out what travellers and gypsies actually want. The GTTA is now 7 years old and should be re-worked prior to the establishment of new policies.