Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 34)
TUESDAY 22 JUNE 2004
DR DONALD
KENRICK AND
DR ROB
HOME
Q20 Mr O'Brien: Why was that?
Dr Home: Why is it empty?
Q21 Mr O'Brien: Why are they like
cattle markets? Is it because the local authorities designed them
like that?
Dr Home: That is the way it was
built: built in the wrong place, the wrong kind of design, like
cattle markets—you know, scaffold poles bent to separate
the pitches—a very stark—
Q22 Mr O'Brien: These are planning
problems, are they?
Dr Home: It is a capital programme
problem of the local authority and how they chose the site. So
indirectly it is a planning problem, yes.
Q23 Mr O'Brien: How would you address
that?
Dr Home: I think I would move
some of them. The site in Birmingham is between a railway line
and a canal. In the early days, after 1968, councils put these
sites as far away as they could from the centre. They are on the
border with the next county. You sometimes find two sites in two
districts just facing each other over the border. They wanted
to get them out of the way. I think some of the sites need to
be relocated. There is a refurbishment grant, which is going very
well, because it is making better sites—although it is cutting
down on the numbers, as I say, because it is making bigger plots
but less people on the site. The new sites ought to be done with
much more care. I think also we need to look at compatibility.
Another factor which differentiates caravan sites from housing
is that much more of the life is in the outside. So you have to
look at family compatibility and compatible ethnic minorities
within the gypsy community, which you would not be able to do
in council housing, for example, or association housing.
Q24 Chris Mole: We touched on the
notion of whether policy should be encouraging gypsies to settle
down and the concerns of the courts. You referred to the ODPM
evidence of the group housing model pioneered in Ireland. Do you
think that is an approach we should try?
Dr Home: Definitely. I think there
is a gap there. I think there are housing associations willing
to have a go at that, but it would need funding through housing
corporations.
Q25 Mr Betts: There are some concerns
about the issue of the count of gypsy caravans and families and
its accuracy and the use to which it is put. Would you like to
elaborate on what improvements you think could be made to ensure
it is more accurate and more useful.
Dr Kenrick: We found when local
gypsy organisations have done counts they have always found about
50% more than the council have. I found that in East Lincoln.
The gypsies were able to find six caravans which the council had
never known about. The first thing is to get better counting and
count everybody and get the help of gypsy organisations where
they exist. Then, in the count itself, I do not know who keys
them in but there are mistakes always. I have brought along a
couple of examples. Suddenly a council site disappears or a private
site disappears and the same figure turns up in the left-hand
column as an authorised site. Obviously the keying in is not done
by anybody who knows what they are doing and they are not checked
properly. I have always assumed that the errors would cancel themselves
out, so that an error in one column would be cancelled out by
an error in another column. I did bring one example which I picked
up last night—in Cambridge, where, private sites have just
disappeared, but if you look in the other column that number turns
up there. Somebody in the ODPM office needs to look at all the
noughts and wonder whether they are correct or not. So we have
two problems: undercounting and then the keying-in is not done
correctly.
Dr Home: That is a simple matter
of data verification. Also you would have to recognise that within
individual local authorities there may be a political pressure
to undercount, especially if the numbers are relatively low. Then
that district can say, "We don't have any need. We don't
need to provide anything at all." In every appeal I do I
try to supplement the very local statistics with the county and
regional and national statistics, so that the inspector can see
the broader picture, and most local authorities, understandably
from their point of view, try to argue against that approach.
Q26 Sir Paul Beresford: The cynic
would say, of course, "If you ask the gypsies, the travellers,
they might exaggerate it the other way."
Dr Home: You could say that.
Q27 Sir Paul Beresford: So it is
six and one half dozen.
Dr Home: These are snap-shot figures
on two days in the year and, short of literally combing the district,
going down every road looking, you have to rely on usually an
environmental health officer's personal knowledge of it. The police
come up with very different statistics, because they are dealing
with a different kind of unauthorised count.
Q28 Chairman: When you say the police
come up with a very different set of figures, do they come up
with much higher figures than the local authorities on almost
all occasions?
Dr Home: Yes, because they are
not counting on a specific day every six months, they are counting
them all the time, and it maybe the same caravans moving from
one place to another place when the police tell them to move on.
So they are recording an incident when the police are called out
when there is a number of caravans at a place on a particular
day. A week later the same caravans will be in another incident
in another place. You are not comparing like with like.
Q29 Mr Betts: How important is it
that we get these figures right?
Dr Kenrick: A number of councils
count on a daily basis because the gypsy officer goes out and
visits every family. South Gloucestershire, for example, has a
daily count. Providing there is somebody to count, they go out
to each new site because they want to make social inquiries about
the families, to see whether they are interested in a house or
a place on a site, or where there are some problems with pregnant
ladies looking for a hospital or something like that. There are
several districts which do a regular count more than every six
months.
Dr Home: How would you define
a 100% accurate count and would it be worth the trouble of doing
it? My view is that the statistics we have are broadly adequate
for the purposes that I have come against and which is trying
to win planning appeals. Personally, there was a major study by
the OPCS in 1990—a highly detailed study, highly elaborate—which
was never put into operation. I think the statistics we have are
adequate provided they are interpreted with a degree of commonsense.
Q30 Mr Betts: Let us go on to the
refurbishment grants. There has been some criticism, Dr Kenrick,
about these and whether they are really delivering any new facilities
as opposed to the occasional bit of improvement to existing ones.
Dr Kenrick: In some cases sites
have been quite transformed. People have water for their own caravans
instead of communal water. They have larger plots, which families
need now because then the younger children can stay on a bit longer
if you have a larger plot. People are happy on the whole with
the way the refurbishment grants are being used. I think of Bexley,
for example, great improvements.
Dr Home: There are some excellent
local authority sites. There is a very good example on the A40
near Oxford and another one in West Oxfordshire. There are some
excellent sites and some of the refurbishments have been very
well spent, but a number of these sites, as Dr Kenrick has said,
have reduced the numbers of pitches. Where have those people gone?
They usually are pushed into council housing. I had a case where
they were pushed into council housing, told it was only temporary,
their caravan was put in store and then—surprise, surprise—it
burned down while the local authority secured accommodation. They
are now stuck in a council house where they do not want to be
and they cannot go back to the site because their pitch has gone.
Q31 Mr Betts: You are saying that
this money that has been available is being used to try to improve
existing sites, but the consequence of that has been to reduce
the number of pitches on those sites—which is probably a
good idea, providing there is more money then to develop new sites
as well.
Dr Home: There is one case up
in Bedfordshire where there has been refurbishment but there is
still an area of the site which is a wasteland, which formerly
had pitches on it but which now does not. The number of pitches
has been reduced.
Q32 Chairman: The pattern seems to
be variable across local authorities. Who in the local authority
should be responsible for gypsy and traveller sites?
Dr Kenrick: I think it should
be the housing people, which is the district.
Q33 Chairman: As soon as you say
it is housing, does that not imply that gradually they should
be transferred to housing?
Dr Kenrick: I think gradually
they will. If we look in Eastern Europe none of the Roma coming
from Eastern Europe are living in a caravan—although if
you read the press you might think they had. Gypsies are already
moving to housing. In any given family you always find a brother
or an uncle in a house—because they use that as an address
to get mail. That is how I know that. If you look in 100 years'
time, I would be very surprised if there are many nomadic families
in England. If you have a lorry as opposed to a horse and cart,
you can travel to Cardiff and back in a day to do a job. You do
not have to take your wife and family with you. Or—the other
way round—a woman going fortune-telling in Brighton can
go down for the day, come back at the weekends, and does not have
to take her husband with her. I am sorry, I am being very sexist
this morning.
Q34 Chairman: You think they should
be the responsibility of the housing department within the local
authority.
Dr Kenrick: Yes, but I think with
guidelines from the regional spatial authorities, which I think
would be very useful. As Sir Paul Beresford said, gypsies move
around, so gypsies who may be in Basildon today could well be
in Brentford tomorrow, or they could be in Hampshire tomorrow,
depending on their trade.
Dr Home: I disagree with what
has been said, that gypsies are eventually all going to settle
down. I do not think that is true. As to where the responsibility
should lie, it cuts across a whole string of local authority services.
Some counties have done excellent work but, now that they no longer
have a statutory responsibility, that role has been weakened.
At the district level there is certainly a need for specialist
guidance, which can only come I believe from the county or the
regional level. I think the regional authorities have a big role
to play in the future here because certain regional offices have
been extremely helpful on that, but it is asking too much of some
smaller local authorities to maintain not just housing but planning,
a whole specialist team and maintain it, and I think there is
a role for the higher levels.
Chairman: On that note, could I thank
you very much for your evidence.
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