Select Committee on Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 176 - 179)

TUESDAY 29 JUNE 2004

MR RICK BRISTOW

  Q176  Chairman: Can I welcome you to the Committee and ask you to introduce yourself for the record and also ask do you want to make an opening statement or are you happy for us to go straight into questions?

  Mr Bristow: My name is Rick Bristow, Cottenham Residents' Association. My only opening statement would be to say that having attended an ODPM seminar and having read much of the evidence that is in the green book you will not find me or residents of Cottenham, or I think general residents across the country, who are not sensitive to the fact that there is a genuine Gypsy-cum-Traveller need. What we are asking for, and we hope you would acknowledge this, is some form of proportionality insofar as it is quite clear through the evidence booklet that the size of site is key. We have certainly found that in Cottenham and also talking to certain other communities around the country that seems to be their view as well.

  Chairman: Thank you very much. Clive Betts?

  Q177  Mr Betts: You are saying the PPGs are beginning to cause chaos because they are being used to override local authority powers in these matters. Can you just explain that statement?

  Mr Bristow: I think I may have done so in the evidence itself insofar as—and I am talking private sites here—what is tending to happen is that Travellers with money are identifying sites which they feel would be suitable for their own occupation, so they are buying the land quite lawfully, they may be paying slightly over the odds for it, but having taken the land they simply move on, bring in the hard core and provide services—water, electricity, et cetera—and then at about that stage they will run into trouble with the local authorities. Those authorities then, as I have explained in my note, tend to issue enforcement and stop notices et cetera, but they are breached. At that point civil law says it is wait and see until such time as the appeals process is followed through. During that time there is a PPG 1/94 that is, broadly speaking, ignored by the local authorities—there is no argument about that—and as a consequence we find that the local communities are simply staring in on something which is broadly unlawful and stays unlawful until such time as an appeals process says otherwise.

  Q178  Mr Betts: I do not see how that is a problem with the planning guidance. It is a matter of process that if someone makes an application and it is turned down, probably quite appropriately turned down, they still have the right to appeal that.

  Mr Bristow: There is no argument over the right to appeal retrospectively. Not to be funny about this, gentlemen, but the reason I wrote a note was not so much the planning process and the justice of the civil process per se it was what tends to accompany this, if you like, unlawful occupation of land, ie the sort of thing that I have described in the evidence that I submitted.

  Q179  Mr Betts: I am not seeing how you are suggesting it should change. If someone moves on to the site then planning permission could almost be retrospective. There is no difference between this planning permission and any other planning permission and until the process is completed and an appeal held then a decision cannot be enforced as such. How would you want to see that changed to remove the sorts of problems that you in your community believe you are experiencing?

  Mr Bristow: The first thing that we would want to see is if we take the planning process as it is, which allows retrospective planning and then subsequent appeals, et cetera, that is fine, but all the while that planning process is taking place may we please have proper behaviour? May we have our rights as normal citizens respected by those persons going on to those sites and in effect misbehaving?


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2004
Prepared 8 November 2004