‘The law needs to recognise the rights of Travellers. Everyone is pushing you aside, pushing you onto the next place. There’s no solution. Basildon want to push us to Chelmsford, Chelmsford want to push you to Manchester, and Manchester want to push you to the moon. They want to kick you out: once you’re not stopping on their doorstep it’s alright. And that’s not really a way to live. It’s not a way for government people or council’s to be carrying on. It’s not’s a human way to be living or to treat people.’ – Mary Flynn, Dale Farm resident and mother of four.

Hostility towards Travellers and Roma is endemic across the UK today. Local newspapers play on the prejudices of NIMBY local residents, reporting on the fear and anger that Travellers and Roma provoke in settled residents. Programmes like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding have fuelled the fires of discrimination by purposefully manipulating and cashing in on racist perceptions of travelling communities. However, these attitudes also underpin central government policy: earlier this year Eric Pickles’ Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) warned that Traveller sites should ‘not dominate the nearest settled community, and avoid placing an undue pressure on the local infrastructure.’ In doing so, the DCLG present a conflict of interests between settled and travelling communities, implying that there is such a thing as ‘too many’ Travellers and Roma families living in a given area. In effect, they promote racism: the direct link can be seen in this weeks’ Express, which welcomed Pickles’ announcement of unlimited fines on caravans stopping on land without permission with the headline ‘New laws will stop Travellers from invading’.

Negative representations in the Media, racist attitudes and attacks, and discriminatory government directives all contribute to the presentation of Travellers and Roma as outsiders who intrude upon the settled community and can be legally denied the right to a home.

Current government policy amounts to a deliberate attempt to eradicate the travelling way of life. At the heart of the most recent attack on Roma and Traveller rights is Pickles’ DCLG. Evictions aren’t simply local disputes between settled residents and ‘intruding’ Travellers. Despite the guise of ‘localism’ adopted by the DCLG, central government policy is backing a wave of evictions, politically, legislatively and financially.

Twenty per cent of Travellers and Roma live under the threat of eviction, either on land that they own without planning permission or squatting on land. This is not by choice: there is a shortfall of almost 6,000 pitches in the UK, whilst half of all Traveller applications for planning permission are turned down [EHRC, 2012]. The government’s flagship announcement of £60 million for new and improved sites over the next 15 years will only translate into 510 additional pitches, providing just 1/12^th of the amount needed. Pickles has used this as a fig leaf of ‘fairness’ to mask the institutional racism that Travellers and Roma face in the planning system. Last years’ Localism Act reinforced legislation criminalising Traveller and Roma communities, abolishing regional targets for councils to provide sites at the same time as allowing councils to evict Traveller and Roma communities even while they are applying for planning permission.

The local impact of the DCLG’s destructive policy agenda is already evident. South Cambridgeshire Council recently reduced its assessment of Traveller and Roma housing needs to zero without even a hint of consultation with the communities concerned. At the same time the council is threatening six Traveller families from Smithy Fen with homelessness. As funding is cut nationally for vital services helping Travellers and Roma engage in consultations and apply for planning permission, these communities become ever more excluded from the processes that determine their right to a home.

The end-game of the DCLG campaign of increased evictions and reduced site provision is the criminalisation and eventual eradication of the travelling way of life. Traveller and Roma communities with nowhere to live are being forced into a cycle of evictions, and ultimately into bricks and mortar accommodation. At Dale Farm, Basildon Council have refuse to accept a duty to provide alternative sites for the community it made homeless, offering bricks and mortar housing to a minority of families. This year has tested the endurance of the Dale Farm community, who have struggled to survive without electricity, water or sanitation on the road leading to their former home. This struggle for survival is a form of resistance; the families refuse to be forced into bricks and mortar accommodation and allow the travelling way of life to be eradicated. As a result, they face a second eviction this winter that may well force them away from the land where their children were born, and onto the side of roads and car parks.

As the anniversary of the last year’s eviction approaches on 19 October, the Traveller Solidarity Network is taking the fight for sites to the doorstep of Pickles’ Department for Communities and Local Government, in solidarity with the families at Dale Farm and Traveller and Roma families facing uncertainty and eviction across the UK. We are fighting for the right to a home and an end to evictions.

Join us.

http://travellersolidarity.org/

https://www.facebook.com/events/140070222801717/

Arriving at the site last week, we were greeted by an elderly man who looked up at the remnants of the children’s rope swings hanging from the trees and said ‘What is there to live for? What hope do we have? My wife and I have talked seriously about ending it all. This is no way to live.’ While the trauma of the eviction is still vivid for the residents, it is what happens next that worries them most of all. Kathleen, an articulate five-year-old with an acute awareness of the challenges facing her community, explained the situation to me: ‘Basildon Council and the police came and they broke everything. They broke the walls, and my granny’s caravan, and they broke all the ground, and even my mum’s back [Kathleen’s mother was hospitalised with a fractured spine during the policing operation]. We were crying and we were so scared. Now, Basildon Council want to move us again, but they can’t put us out on the road because where can we go?’

It is this last question that remains unanswered for the Dale Farm residents. Contrary to reports that the Dale Farm Travellers owned property in Ireland, the 83 families who lived at Dale Farm are now homeless. Long before the eviction, the Travellers said they would willingly leave Dale Farm if culturally appropriate alternative housing was provided, but Basildon Council have refused to acknowledge any duty to provide solutions for the community they evicted from their homes. Instead, they are pouring their resources into preparing a new set of enforcement notices, expected to be issued in the next few weeks, which will force the community out of Dale Farm and into car parks and lay bys. The children, who are the first literate generation of Dale Farm Travellers and have continued to attend school throughout the upheaval, will be uprooted from both their education and their community. Conditions at Dale Farm are dismal, but life on the road will involve endless evictions. As Mary Flynn put it, ‘No one would ever stay here if they had a choice, some place else to go. But if they evict us again, we’ll be on the road to nowhere’.

The situation at Dale Farm is not just a product of local tensions, but is symptomatic of the wider problems facing the travelling community. There is a shocking deficit of Traveller sites in the UK: 20% of the caravan-dwelling Gypsy and Irish Traveller community do not have a legal or secure place to live. In the mid-1990s, Travellers were encouraged by central government to buy their own land and settle.[1] However, planning permission is rarely granted to Traveller communities; according to the Commission for Racial Equality, more than 90% of Travellers planning applications are initially rejected, compared to 20% on average.[2] The double standards of planning applications can be witnessed in Basildon, where the Council have recently authorised a dogs’ home on the same ‘protected’ greenbelt on which Dale Farm is located.[3] In this context, Council leader Tony Ball’s maxim that ‘the [planning] law must be upheld’ begins to appear rather hollow. Indeed, while the government have recently injected some much needed cash into the provision of Traveller sites, they have simultaneously removed the duty of local councils to provide sites, increased powers to evict ‘illegal’ encampments and undermined the ability of travelling communities to challenge eviction.[4] The Dale Farm Travellers, like many others belonging to this marginalised community, are stuck between a rock and a hard place as their traditional way of life is criminalised; they cannot travel, they cannot buy their own land and settle, and local councils like Basildon are offering them no alternatives. As Basildon Council issues statistics claiming that, at a cost of over £7 million, the eviction of this community came cheap, urgent questions need to be asked about the immense human cost of institutionalised prejudice.

The Traveller Solidarity Network is organising a national speaker tour about Dale Farm throughout the month of March. Find out when it is coming to your town here: http://travellersolidarity.org/traveller-solidarity-tour/

[1] Department for Communities and Local Government, Gypsies and Travellers: Facts and Figures (Department for Communities and Local Government, March 2004).

[2] Sarah Cemlyn et al, Inequalities experienced by Gypsy and Traveller communities: A review (Equality and Human Rights Commission 2009), p. 8

[3] Basildon Borough Council, PLANNING APPLICATION NO. 11/00433/FULL (Basildon Borough Council, December 2011): http://www.basildonmeetings.info/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?AIId=26527.

[4] Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, Submission to Communities and Local Government Select Committee inquiry into the abolition of regional spatial strategies, (Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, September 2010). Lord Avebury, Legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill (Hansard, 24 January 2012), c. 928-941.