ODPM Committee visit to Appleby Horse
Fair, 7 June 2004
INTERVIEW WITH PAUL WINTER
ANDREW BENNETT: So what should be done?
PAUL WINTER: What should be done? Well,
at the first stage there could be strong guidance from the government
to say that local authorities should provide some basic facilities,
acknowledging that they've got a right to be there. As long as
they're not causing a nuisance—a major nuisance or blocking
routes or anything that they should be given a certain reasonable
length of time of maybe a couple of months to be there. And then
the children could get into school, get their education and then
when they move to another area, if every authority was doing the
same thing, every authority was providing some basic facilities,
it would save—
BILL O'BRIEN: How many would you expect
the local authority to accommodate as temporary?
PAUL WINTER: Well, if every authority was
doing it together at once, the travellers would be travelling
as they do in a pattern, you could say that you'd have a top limit
of 20 trailers. You could decide what the top limit would be.
That's a—you know, 20 is a reasonable number.
BILL O'BRIEN: What happens to the people
above 20? What do you do with them?
PAUL WINTER: Well, they'd find another patch
of land, which is what they do at the moment.
BILL O'BRIEN: Well, who would—who
would instruct them to do that? You see, it's easy to say. Nobody
instructs them at the moment. Now, to follow your theory and I
know there's something in it, if it's 20 trailers. But if you've
got 25 trailers, who tells the other five that, "Well, no,
you can't stay"? Because that's when the trouble starts.
PAUL WINTER: Right. Well, what you'd have
to—at the moment, there is no toleration, is there? People
either are ignored or they're moved on.
ANDREW BENNETT: If it was 20 trailers, there'd
be little problems in many of our areas. It's when you get the
40 and 45 trailers—that's when the problem starts.
BILL O'BRIEN: And that's where we are at
the present time. Now, we're wanting to try and accommodate that
kind of thing but it's easy to say, "Well, local authorities
should agree to 20 trailers. Above 20 trailers, then the people
should acknowledge that they shouldn't be there". Now, how
do we do that?
PAUL WINTER: The thing to do is to get in
when you've got your 20 trailers or your 10 trailers at the start
and get an agreement signed, what they call a facilities agreement
signed. And I've had a barrister looking at this and it's quite
in order under the existing legislation. And it's a voluntary
agreement. It doesn't give them any rights to the land and you
say that, on our part, the travellers' part, they would—they
would keep the area tidy.
On the council side, they will provide
refuse collection and maybe a standpipe and maybe toilets, you
know, so basic facilities. And people would sign up to that and
if—and that would be the agreement and those families would
have the right to it.
And if the—if the site increased
and other families joined on, your liaison officer or whoever
it is whose job it is to do it, you bailiff or, you know, whoever
deals with them, they'd go back and they'd say, "Right, you're
still under 20 trailers. Everybody on this site has signed up
to this facilities agreement. If you want to stay here, you're
going to have to sign up to this as well. Otherwise, you're not
going to have a right to stay here for this length of time".
Then when it to 20, you say, "The site is full, right. For
this period of time, no more will be allowed to stay here".
And if anybody else—so, the next time your liaison person
goes out and there's a couple more families or one more family,
you say, "Right, well, all these families have signed up.
We know the names of them. I'm afraid you're going to get evicted".
But you don't evict the whole site. All
you do is you evict—you've got your names of the families
that have signed up and agreed to it. They stay. You only evict
the families that are going over your numbers.
Ever since the 1994 Criminal Justice Act,
it's been chaos. It has been 10 years of things going from bad
to worse, you know, and it's the last government that brought
in the Criminal Justice Act. I'm not blaming this government for
doing that but what we do want from this government is something
positive that will acknowledge—
ANDREW BENNETT: Well, you think the simple
solution would be to let people come up with an agreement between
the local authority on a site that they've moved on to with a
limited number?
PAUL WINTER: Yes.
ANDREW BENNETT: Now, is 20 reasonable or
would it be much better to bring it down to about 10?
PAUL WINTER: You could either say numbers
of families but given that one family might have two trailers—you
might limited the number of families or you might limit the number
of trailers. I suppose it's easier to do it by trailers because
you can just count them, can't you? So, you know, if an authority
thought that 10 was more reasonable, they'd have to—but
to provide places for 20 trailers, you'd then be looking at two
pieces of land.
ANDREW BENNETT: Yeah. Now, in order to provide
school places—is there a number that you need to make it
economic for the local council to put in—
PAUL WINTER: One child. One child of school
age makes it economic to provide a school place.
ANDREW BENNETT: Yes, but it's easy enough
to provide a place for one child, isn't it? It's when you want
to say, well, you want some form of special education for the
children because they've either slipped behind or other things
like that. So, quite a lot of local authorities have an education
officer who is looking specifically at travelling people, don't
they?
PAUL WINTER: That's right, but the policy
now—is to integrate the children into mainstream schools.
ANDREW BENNETT: Yes.
PAUL WINTER: So, if they're of school age,
then the policy will be to have them in to mainstream schools
and provide the support in the school to—
ANDREW BENNETT: But if you've got 20 children
coming from a particular site suddenly into a school, that puts
a strain on a school's resources, doesn't it?
PAUL WINTER: Yeah, I can understand that.
Say, a village school. Well, you might then say the policy near
the village schools might be for 10 trailers. Now, 10 trailers
might only be five families and five families might only have
a couple of children of school age each. So, if you're looking
at maybe 10 school age children and then you've got the secondary
age ones, well, they might be reluctant to go into school.
CLIVE BETTS: How many of them will be going
to school for a decent part of the year?
PAUL WINTER: Right, the primary age children
and a lot of the pre-school children now, almost 100% are in school,
I would say. Secondary age, it's increasing and it used to be
estimated one in five as the 1989 HMR report estimated one in
five attending secondary school. It's going up a bit, maybe two
in five, so—
ANDREW BENNETT: So, actually, traveller
education has improved?
PAUL WINTER: It has, it's improved the situation
for travellers and coming to events like this, it—where
teachers that have organised this and it gives us a more human
face. We're not seen as people in authority who are forcing them
to do something that's going to deny their way of life. There's
a real concern that, as they get into secondary age, the expectation
is that they're going to—the lads are going to go and help
their dads and earn a living and learn a skill. The girls are
going to help their mums and look after children and be homemakers—very
traditional roles.
But a lot of parents are realising that times
are changing and you can't just hold on to traditional roles without
understanding that the modern world requires different skills.
So, a lot of the families are wanting to have computer skills
now as well as reading and writing. So, they're under—you
know, they're starting to realise that education has things to
offer.
CLIVE BETTS: So, what about adult education
then, for the parents as well. I mean, there's obviously skills
for them and probably they missed out?
PAUL WINTER: Yeah, there's a lot of demand.
A lot of parents are embarrassed about not being able to read,
if they can't read, and the adult education that they would find
acceptable would be one-to-one. They'd be—a lot of them
would be frightened to go into a class, an adult education class,
and—particularly a big college or something and be shown
up. You know, that's how they'd see it.
CLIVE BETTS: How can you help them get in
touch with access of that sort of thing?
PAUL WINTER: Well, we've got a contact list
of traveller education services around the country. We give that
out to people and we say, "You're first point of contact
is best traveller education", and then they will know adult
education contacts locally and, in some areas, the funding is
sufficient to provide these tutors.
In other areas, it's more difficult. In some
areas, there's drop-in centres so there might be, like, access
points. Connections is a good access point at the moment and,
in some areas, there are mobiles that—I mean, to come back
to the unofficial sites, mobiles could perhaps go and do a little
bit of introductory work so that, you know, if they're only there
for a short while, they don't just come in and out disrupting
the schools.
BILL O'BRIEN: Are there any problems with
different groups mixing on the same site?
PAUL WINTER: Maybe on some sites. It varies
around the country. I know some sites where you can have Gypsies
and Irish travellers living quite happily together on the same
site. In other parts of the country, there can be tensions with
different groups. You've got to know the local situation and this
is where local knowledge is important. I mean, there's got to
be a national framework which forces authorities to do something
because, at the moment, authorities just move the problem to a
neighbouring authority. So, you can't have a piecemeal solution
to this—to these difficult problems.
ANDREW BENNETT: Thanks very much.
PAUL WINTER: Thank you very much.
CLIVE BETTS: Nice to see you.
| 
