Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
TUESDAY 22 JUNE 2004
DR DONALD
KENRICK AND
DR ROB
HOME
Q1 Chairman: Could I welcome you
to the first session of the Select Committee's inquiry into gypsy
and traveller sites. Could I point out for anyone who is interested
that the evidence we received by the closing date has now been
printed in this volume, which you can get if you want to spend
£14 or you can get it on the Select Committee's website.
Could I welcome the two of you to our first session and ask you
to identify yourselves for the record.
Dr Kenrick: I am Dr Donald Kenrick.
Dr Home: Dr Robert Home.
Q2 Chairman: Do either of you want
to say anything by way of introduction or are you happy for us
to go straight to questions.
Dr Kenrick: I would like to say
two things. First of all, I am doing a lot of private planning,
which I did not mention in my submission—which is probably
why I am here anyway. Also, in the figure of 2,700 which I give,
I made an allowance for tolerated sites. That is why my figure
of 2,700 may not look the same as the one in the government statistics,
since you would have to add tolerated sites and estimates.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q3 Mr Clelland: In the 1968 Caravan
Act gypsies are defined as "persons of nomadic habit of life,
whatever their race or origin". How many gypsies and travellers
still operate a "nomadic habit of life"?
Dr Kenrick: If we are talking
about travelling from place to place all around the country on
a weekly basis, monthly basis, knocking on doors, I would say
about 700 families all the year round.
Q4 Mr Clelland: Out of a total of?
Dr Kenrick: I would say about
10,000 families.
Q5 Mr Clelland: Out of 10,000 there
is a very small number who might genuinely be described as gypsies
in the sense of the Act.
Dr Kenrick: In that sense, but
the courts have decided six weeks in a year is enough, and you
can spend the winter not travelling, so it has been modified by
the court since then.
Dr Home: My view would be slightly
different. You have the count with 13,000 caravans on all kinds
of sites, and they attempted to calculate occupancy rates—how
many that would be per caravan. You have a large number of authorised
sites, where people would be far more resident than not, but they
still travel away at certain periods, particularly between April
and October. There is the additional test imposed in the courts
that they are travelling for an economic purpose, and there is
a variety of activities that might go on—dealing and so
on. How far you would count horse trading at gypsy fairs as being
sufficient economic activity, would depend on the facts of the
case. There is a large number of gypsies who are either in a transitional
phase towards being settled or who are combining aspects of both
ways of life. The figure of 700 that Dr Kenrick has come up with
is a new one to me.
Q6 Mr Cummings: How would you define
gypsies?
Dr Home: There is a statutory
definition and there has been a great deal of case law.
Q7 Mr Cummings: What is the definition?
Dr Home: There is the statutory
definition, which presumably you are familiar with: "persons
of a nomadic habit of life, whatever their race or origin"
and that has been qualified and refined, if you wish, by various
judicial interpretations which would take quite a long time to
go through. The impact of most of the judicial interpretations
has been to impose additional hurdles which a gypsy has to sort
of go through before they can pass the test, as it were.
Q8 Mr Cummings: Do we class gypsies
as Romanies?
Dr Kenrick: Many Romanies are
gypsies and many gypsies are Romanies, but they are not the same.
You would have two circles, gypsies and Romanies, and they would
interlink. You have Romanies living in houses who have not travelled
for probably generations and you have gypsies who are not Romanies.
Perhaps I could expand on Dr Home's answer to a previous question.
A real problem at the moment is that elderly gypsies who cannot
travel any more are now classed by the courts as not gypsies (the
Berry v Wrexham case, which the House of Lords refused
to look at again). When a gypsy reaches the age of 70-odd and
cannot travel, they are not gypsies, so they cannot go on a site,
so they have a bit of a problem there. Similarly, if they are
too ill to travel, that is a bit of a problem. This reduces the
number of statutory gypsies.
Q9 Sir Paul Beresford: Dr Kenrick
gave a figure of 700 for those who are moving—at least partially,
as I understood it. What figure would you give? You did not recognise
his figure.
Dr Home: He has been doing some
detailed work, so I have no doubt that it is based on some serious
methodology. The only figures one can really quote unofficially
are the unauthorised caravans in the six monthly count statistics.
We are talking about 25% of a total of 13,000-14,000 caravans.
Those unauthorised caravans may be on their own land, they may
be more or less mobile, so, short of interviewing each and every
last one of the 13,000 caravan occupants and asking them a series
of highly detailed questions, I have drawn a comparison with livestock
movement books, to see: When exactly were you away and for what
purpose?
Q10 Sir Paul Beresford: "Guesstimate"
is the right, word, is it?
Dr Home: They are all guesstimates.
It is very difficult to do serious demographic work in this area.
Q11 Mr Clelland: Given the restriction
on the number of sites and the number of pitches and given what
you just said about people finding themselves in a position where
they no longer travel because of illness or inability or perhaps
because they do not want to, would it not be reasonable to expect
people who are no longer travelling as much as the small genuine
minority to move into permanent conditions, so that there are
more sites for the people who are genuinely travellers?
Dr Kenrick: A lot of Romanies
and gypsies have never lived in a house and they do not like the
idea of the four walls.
Q12 Mr Clelland: Yes, but that is
a small number of the total.
Dr Kenrick: We do not really know.
Q13 Mr Clelland: I thought you told
me before it was a small number.
Dr Kenrick: I said there were
700 families moving all the time: 700 nomadic families who need
transit sites. The other families are living on their own land
or private sites or council sites in the winter and they travel
in the summer for a certain number of weeks. Many of those families
would not live in a house. They like a mobile home rather than
a caravan, perhaps because they get a bit more luxury for the
women, with running water and things like that. Men as well benefit
from running water. Then there is a decision in the Clarke
v Tunbridge Wells case which says that if a gypsy has an aversion
to housing he cannot be forced to go into housing. It is not suitable
accommodation. That is a quite well-known court case.
Q14 Chairman: Is that aversion because
of the fabric of the building or because of the costs?
Dr Kenrick: It is the four walls.
Mobile homes are not cheap. It is the four walls which are thick
and you do not feel you are in the country. I was asking people
about this because sometimes a mobile home looks very much like
my flat—apart from being mobile—in size and the way
it is laid out with furniture and they say, "We don't like
the four thick walls which cut ourselves out." Many gypsies
will not visit their relations who live in houses for this reason,
because they do not like going inside the door.
Dr Home: Just to expand on that,
there is a huge amount of anthropological work done on this. The
cultural values among most of the hundreds that I have dealt with
would confirm that. I have a large number who have tried housing
and have come out of it, or they have bought a house just so they
can keep a caravan in the back garden with a yard alongside and
so on. The Government has never, except for one brief statement
in 1968, had a policy objective of encouraging gypsies to settle
down, and the courts have been very wary about that because it
could then be seen as a mechanism for getting settled accommodation
for people who might or might not be gypsies. The courts have
been very cautious on that.
Q15 Chairman: In a lot of European
countries a lot of effort has been made to get people to settle
down, some of it successfully.
Dr Home: That would be true. I
have not done much comparative work in the rest of Europe. The
minister back in '92, when the Criminal Justice Act was being
debated, said "not all gypsies are travellers and not all
travellers are gypsies". That is the simple fact of it. One
reason why it is very difficult to pin down figures is because
it is all related to a habit of life which legally you can have
one day and not the next, going back to the original cases in
1959.
Dr Kenrick: There are estates
with large numbers of gypsy families living in housing, but they
tend to live almost as if they are living in caravans, so you
find a lot of activity on the road, there are horses, there are
lorries. I do not know how many, but a certain number of gypsy
families would like to live in housing if they could have a mixture
of housing and caravans with their own kind. That is what has
been done in the Republic of Ireland—particularly mentioned
in the ODPM report—and that would be something that ought
to be looked at more, the possibility of having a mixture of housing
and caravans.
Q16 Mr O'Brien: On the question of
sites and planning, both of you have made some recommendations
on this particular issue. What kind of sites are required? What
are we thinking of?
Dr Home: As long as the statutory
provision remains as it is, the only new sites are going to come
from gypsies themselves pursuing their own applications and these
will normally be the small privately owned sites. They would be
defined as long-stay or residential sites, even though the patterns
of movement would continue and do continue. Then there is also,
as the University of Birmingham study says, a need for transit
sites, which means that when you are moving around you have to
stay somewhere. Personally I think that a lot of gypsies would
be quite happy, and do, to provide transit accommodation on their
own sites, so you could do more in that area, but you would need
planning permissions that define this and perhaps define periods
of the year. Public authority transit site provision has been
singularly unsuccessful. There is a handful of sites, but they
always give rise to all sorts of problems. It may be that there
is a place for a private solution to some of that.
Dr Kenrick: There are families
who still want to get on to council sites. I would say that we
could do with half as many council sites again as we have now,
going by the waiting lists—particularly in the Home Counties,
which is where I do most of my work, I must say. There is still
scope for more council sites, and there are people who want to
go on council sites still because they do not have the money to
buy their own land.
Q17 Mr O'Brien: Is there a regional
aspect to this? Is there a problem in one region that does not
apply to another?
Dr Home: If you look at the statistics,
there has been a drift south because of economic opportunities
mainly. The pressures are—surprise, surprise—greater
in the south east and the eastern region than I believe elsewhere
in the country. The other point is that you will have seen in
the last couple of days the attention to rural homelessness, referring
to young people who cannot afford housing. The same pattern applies
to gypsies, to the younger generation. I have a lot of young clients
in their early twenties who cannot stay with their parents because
the permission does not allow. Sometimes they get an extra caravan
so they can stay there, but they often have to go out on their
own and that is often where the new cases are coming from.
Q18 Mr O'Brien: Professor Kenrick,
you said there should be more council sites. What evidence do
you have for that?
Dr Kenrick: The waiting lists.
There are waiting lists on nearly every site I know of in the
Home Counties. The waiting lists in Essex have been closed, with
25 families on one of them. That is a site with 16 pitches and
there are 25 waiting to go on it. It is because it is a well-managed
site, I will say that.
Q19 Mr O'Brien: In some of the written
evidence given to us, the Wakefield Authority say, "There
is no evidence of significant further demand for permanent gypsy
sites" in the Wakefield district because people, when they
are directed on to the site, refuse to go. This is the conflict
we have. You are saying there is evidence of a need for more sites
to be made available but some local authorities are saying there
is no evidence to that effect.
Dr Home: I think it varies from
parts of the country and authority to authority. I am not that
familiar with Wakefield. There is a general drift to the south,
plus some of these sites are pretty dire. I have seen one site
in Lincolnshire that was empty. It was like a sort of cattle market,
concrete pen.
| 
