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


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 259 - 279)

TUESDAY 13 JULY 2004

CHIEF CONSTABLE ALASTAIR MCWHIRTER, QPM MA

  Q259  Chairman: Good morning Mr McWhirter and welcome to the Committee. Could I ask you first of all to identify yourself for the record, please?

Mr McWhirter: I am Alistair McWhirter, Chief Constable of Suffolk and representative of ACPO.

  Q260  Chairman: Do you want to say anything by way of introduction or are you happy for us to go straight to questions?

  Mr McWhirter: I would like to say that I represent ACPO on its Public Order Sub-Committee and speak also on behalf of rural policing issues on behalf of ACPO.

  Q261  Chris Mole: Good morning Chief Constable. In your submission you have said that "the police experience is that there are insufficient sites to meet demand". Do you believe that the Government should reintroduce a statutory duty on local authorities to provide sites for Gypsies and Travellers?

  Mr McWhirter: I am not sure that it is a matter for the police to comment on, to be quite honest. What I can tell you is that it would make a great difference to us to have more sites because we feel that the number of sites does not meet the demand for them and therefore the police, along with local authorities, are constantly put in a situation where they have to deal with people who have nowhere to stay. Essentially what we are doing is moving on homeless people from one place to another, very often not knowing where those people are going to or alternatively knowing that they will merely move half a mile down the road to another site which may be worse than the site they are on.

  Q262  Chris Mole: In your submission you have been critical of agencies working in separate silos. Do you think there is a need for greater inter-agency cooperation?

  Mr McWhirter: I think there is a significant need for greater inter-agency cooperation. If I can I would like to commend the ODPM and the Home Office on the latest guidance because I think the guidance goes a long way to helping us to develop that sort of partnership working at a local level and for me the great strength of the document is that for the first time it identifies a clear lead and it gives that clear lead to local authorities which was not there before. With Section 61 and Section 77 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act the police and local authorities were often squabbling between themselves as to who had responsibility; we now have a clear lead. That said, silos are still there because what happens in local communities is that a group of Travellers moves in and takes over a piece of land and then very often the police, the local authority and the land owner will work together and will eventually move the people off either by using the criminal law or civil law; they will be moved off, they will leave the district council area and everyone will breathe a great sigh of relief because they have gone. Somebody will pay for the clearing up and so on but nobody ever takes the responsibility for passing on the information about who are the people who are actually causing damage, who are the people who are ripping off members of the public by offering to do work and then doing slip-shod work and not sharing that information with other agencies. What happens is that no intelligence follows on from group to group and I believe very strongly—and ACPO believes very strongly—that we should now overcome that barrier and for the first time try to share information across the country, but we feel that it needs government will for that to happen because it will need to bring together more agencies to work together in law enforcement for a very long time.

  Q263  Chris Mole: You have touched on the national need and the information system which I think we are going to return to in a moment, but we have also been told that there is a need for a regional dimension in terms of over-viewing the appropriate location for sites. Is that something you would agree with?

  Mr McWhirter: I would agree that that would be very helpful. Again I do not think it is a matter for the police to comment specifically on sites but it would help us to do our work to have somebody who had a clear picture of what the need and the demand was. I find myself in the situation in Suffolk where we are in an oasis, surrounded by counties which have large influxes of Gypsies and Travellers and Suffolk has very few by comparison. There are routes and areas that constantly have Gypsies and Travellers moving across those areas; there are traditional areas and there are new routes because people tend to go where work is and we see Travellers diversifying into all sorts of new occupations. One of the things that has made a huge difference is the introduction of the mobile telephone which has resulted in many Travellers advertising businesses through Yellow Pages and running what appear to be legitimate businesses in the sense of having premises and so on, and Travellers then come and do the work and they have none of the overheads that regular businesses have including tax or national insurance or any of the safety issues that other businesses have to pay.

  Q264  Chairman: You were a bit reluctant to comment about a statutory duty. Can I just press you a little bit more about this question of a statutory duty?

  Mr McWhirter: What I can say is that when there was a statutory duty the problem was still there but it was less of a problem than perhaps we have now.

  Q265  Chairman: So far as the police are concerned, if there was a statutory duty on local authorities it might help.

  Mr McWhirter: It might help, yes.

  Q266  Christine Russell: Can I go on to the issue of managing anti-social behaviour now? Would you like to give us your comments on whether or not you feel the police have sufficient powers to tackle anti-social behaviour that sometimes sadly does occur between Travellers and local communities, rather than within the travelling communities?

  Mr McWhirter: Yes, we have sufficient powers to deal with anti-social behaviour; we are not seeking any additional powers. We were part of the discussion on the powers that we have in the latest Act. I think it would help if there were sites to move people on to. Going back to the anti-social behaviour part of your question, the Government has given us perfectly sufficient powers to deal with it. That does not mean that there are not huge difficulties in dealing with it because I can honestly say that I have never seen such racism in communities other than when Travellers move into an area; there is a naked racism which is not there with other minority ethnic groups who are even more visible in many ways. The public reaction to Travellers can be very much equated to the nineteenth century Punch cartoon where a man is standing on the edge of a village with another man and a villager from the next village is walking towards them and in the caption underneath one man says to another: "Who's him, Jim?" The other one says, "'E be a foreigner" and the first one says, "We'll heave half a brick at him then". That is still the attitude that communities have to strangers moving in generally, we do not see it only with Gypsies and Travellers. In my own county at the moment we have problems with Portuguese families moving into rural communities and so on. We know from the reaction we get when Travellers move into an area when we will constantly get telephone calls saying that crime has gone up and so on and very often the figures do not match that. Travellers arriving in an area does not mean that there is going to be an increase in crime; what it often means is a feeling of unease in the local community and as a result tensions are raised particularly if Travellers then go into a pub and take that pub over very often in large numbers and you end up with conflict in the community. Sometimes that is very difficult to deal with. One of your earlier people giving evidence—the gentleman from Cottenham Residents Association—said that the police will not go in unless they are sure they are going to win. To a certain extent he is quite right. We are very careful about going in there and sorting out these problems because very often we have few police officers initially to be able to deal with that and we have to build up sufficient resources because there are usually fairly large numbers of people involved. It can prove difficult to deal with and often in mêlées and those kinds of disorders it is hard to identify entirely who is to blame and how you can sort it out other than by stopping the breach of the peace that has taken place.

  Q267  Christine Russell: So you are really saying that it is an irrational fear of outsiders firstly and then secondly police forces are reluctant to intervene unless they have sufficient officers available.

  Mr McWhirter: Yes.

  Q268  Christine Russell: So the criticism that you turn a blind eye is not true, but you do need to make sure that you have sufficient resources on the ground.

  Mr McWhirter: Yes. For all the things that we deal with in terms of Travellers one has to have sufficient resources. Frequently we are asked why we do not use Section 61 more often. If you serve a notice under Section 61 to require someone to leave a site you actually have to have the resources available once you have given the people a period of notice to take all of the caravans into your possession and keep them safely, you have to find homes for the people you are making homeless and so on. You have to have a huge number of people involved, it is not as easy as saying, "Okay, go off by 12 o'clock tomorrow" and sending a police officer along to make sure that that happens. It is not as simple as people think; it is the logistics of actually making it happen that are very difficult.

  Q269  Chairman: What you are telling us actually is that if there is a sufficient number of Gypsies on a site they can stop the police actually enforcing law and order unless you have sufficient resources to do it.

  Mr McWhirter: Yes, we have to have sufficient resources and we will get sufficient resources and we do get sufficient resources to do it. We have had tactics adopted by the travelling community of moving in large numbers and certainly a couple of years ago it was at its height when we were getting groups of 150 caravans going round in large groups descending on, for example, a large shopping centre car park, taking over that car park completely at night and then dominating that area for some days. As the guidance says, there are areas where it will always be unacceptable for people to camp unlawfully and we will take action and do that, but we have to then get the resources together to do that and they are very expensive resources to get together. You also then have to have an idea where those 150 caravans are going to go although it is unlikely that people will actually allow us to seize them. So they will probably pull off which is what happens very often; we get all the resources together, we ready to do it and then they will pull away because they do not want to lose their homes, who would? Then it becomes a game of cat and mouse with people being followed and then they settle on a piece of land. Eventually once they move out of that district council area—and this is coming back to the silo point—or indeed out of that force area it is no longer that area's problem.

  Q270  Chairman: You put the resources in to move them on when there is a big group of them illegally camped, but what about going into smaller sites for things like failure to display tax discs and other relatively minor criminal activities? Is it a temptation for police officers to think that there are other things of a higher priority and so they get away with a certain level of misdemeanours which would be pursued with other members of the public?

  Mr McWhirter: I think there is a tactic that is used by some Travellers—and I would say it is a small minority of Travellers—to make many of their sites no-go areas for council officials, for police and for people from any agency. I think there is a reluctance on the part of some agencies to move into areas where there are Travellers' sites. Police officers on the whole have no difficulty moving onto some of the smaller Travellers' sites or indeed, the big ones; we do not have no-go areas, we try not to create those sorts of areas and we will go in and enforce the law. I can give you an example of this from only last week in my own police area where we went onto sites and arrested people early in the morning for offences that had been committed. We do take action and we will not allow no-go areas.

  Q271  Mr Cummings: Do you believe that the Gypsies and Traveller community could themselves do more to eradicate anti-social and criminal behaviour from the community?

  Mr McWhirter: I think that all communities could do more to eradicate anti-social behaviour. When I speak to Gypsy groups privately rather than at public meetings, they will often say to me that they wish they could eradicate some of the people who cause the most difficulties. There are difficulties in a number of areas; it is not just anti-social behaviour in its broader sense, sometimes it is family disputes and domestic disputes which spill over into the wider community and those can often cause significant problems where you have a group on perhaps an  authorised site and another group on an unauthorised site and there are tensions between the two groups locally.

  Q272  Mr Cummings: Obviously you believe that something positive can be done by the Gypsy and Traveller community. Can you tell the Committee how you believe this can be achieved and whether any progress has been made in that direction in the past? Do you have any practical examples?

  Mr McWhirter: I think the only thing that can be done at a local level in terms of reducing anti-social behaviour is to keep dialogue going right from the start. I think the new guidance which has been issued is extremely helpful in relation to giving good examples of how that dialogue can be first of all made and then maintained. I think it comes down to having good Gypsy and Traveller liaison officers; it comes down to having named individuals in police forces.

  Q273  Chairman: When you talk about liaison officers, is that liaison officers within the police force or within the local authority or both?

  Mr McWhirter: In the local authority but then having named police officers who are also liaison people so that the local authority and the police are working together as one. That is why I am pleased that the guidance—although it has not get been formally launched in a broader sense—gives clear plans as to how you can set up a local strategy and to work that through. I think that if those areas that are affected by Gypsies and Travellers moving in do have plans in place in relation to that you will at least be able to start the process of being able to create a dialogue with the Gypsy and Traveller community to be able to help them to eradicate that sort of behaviour while people are camping in their particular area. I think that is about setting up agreements at a local level about what you will do about rubbish, about behaviour generally and all those sorts of things which is saying that if there is a period of toleration then they will only be tolerated if they comply with these sets of standards. I think the standards that are applied should be the same standards that apply to the settled community; we are not asking for more of Gypsies and Travellers than we are of the settled community.

  Q274  Mr Cummings: Gypsy and Traveller groups have indicated to this Committee that all sites should obviously have amenity blocks on each pitch, but your submission indicates to the Committee that amenity blocks on transit sites are frequently subject to extensive and criminal damage. Have you any suggestions how this damage can be avoided? Is it a matter of educating the Travellers themselves, alongside their rights, to take the responsibilities that go with those rights in order to protect what amenities are being provided for them?

  Mr McWhirter: I believe that in the design of any new site there needs to be consultation, as you would with the settled community about the design of houses. I think the transit sites should be designed in   consultation with the Gypsy and Traveller community. I think that is the only way we are going to avoid the damage. I think you are going to see a transit site tomorrow where there has been extensive damage in the past. I used to police that area so I know about that particular site. That is an area where there was a huge amount of money spent on that particular site and then it was very seriously damaged.

  Q275  Chairman: Was that because it was badly designed?

  Mr McWhirter: I do not know the reason behind that and I do not think I can answer the question fully. All I am saying is that I think that if you are going to be successful in designing something you want people to use and they feel is effective, then there needs to be consultation in that process.

  Q276  Chris Mole: You were touching just now on the importance that ACPO see in having a cross-cutting information system to record information about anti-social behaviour or environmental damage. Can you explain how that might work and would it be similar to the New Age Traveller monitoring system of the 1980s and 1990s?

  Mr McWhirter: Yes, I think it would be similar to the New Age Traveller monitoring system of the 1980s and 1990s because that was really the model that was adopted then for dealing with unauthorised camping by New Age Travellers at a time when they were going round in very large groups and causing major disruption to the life of individual communities. I would see this working in a similar way but slightly differently. First of all I think there needs to be a national database which is maintained and which can share information with local authorities, with the police, with the Environment Agency and with trading standards and, if it were thought appropriate, also with the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise. This has to do with two aspects, one is environmental damage caused by people who camp in an unauthorised way and then move on and leave that damage and cause disruption to the life of the community. The second aspect is to do with issues around the avoidance of duty, the avoidance of VAT and industrial processes which are carried out by some Travellers, particularly in the West Midlands area where there is a lot of wire stripping and burning going on on these individual sites. There is a huge amount of turnover in terms of money, little of which seems to attract any form of tax or information and I do think there is a taxation opportunity which has been missed here and I feel—although I have no evidence to support this—that both Customs and Excise and Trading Standards are not as involved as they should be with Gypsies and Travellers.

  Q277  Chris Mole: Whilst I am sure the Chancellor would welcome the additional VAT income, is there not a serious worry that people on this list are never going to get on a proper site and are going to be permanently camped illegally as a result?

  Mr McWhirter: I think that what we are talking about is people who are camping in an unauthorised way rather than people coming onto an authorised site, although I can see the point you are making. We still have significant numbers every night camping in an unauthorised way and it is about somebody arriving in an area and it being found that when they were on their last site or last site but one, they caused £10,000 worth of damage. I think that as a local authority and as a police force you have a right then to say, "If you come and camp in this area then these are the strict rules that we are going to apply to you or you are not going to be allowed to stop in this area or on this particular site". I know that has the potential for difficulties; I know that it has also the potential for breaching people's human rights and that one would have to manage this in a very effective way which complied with both the Data Protection Act and also allow Travellers to access the data that was being held on them because they are the data subjects after all. This is not criminal intelligence in its broadest way but I feel it would encourage people who are abusing the system and living above the law at the present time to actually take their responsibilities and comply with the law.

  Q278  Chris Mole: So ACPO have acknowledged those civil liberties questions.

  Mr McWhirter: Yes.

  Q279  Chris Mole: What could you then do to reassure people that it would be used to trace offenders and not—as some Gypsies and Travellers might be concerned—an index of all of them?

  Mr McWhirter: The last thing I would want would be for it to be an index of Gypsies and Travellers. That would be wholly wrong and I do not think it should even be an index of those who camp in an unauthorised way—although that is unlawful—because I think that in itself would be one step too far in terms of a draconian approach. What I think it should do is to identify and deal quite properly with the minority of people who give Gypsies and Travellers a bad name and who do use their ability to move round the country to avoid their responsibilities to the local communities.


 
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