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Lord Avebury moved Amendment No. 223:
"PROVISION OF ADEQUATE AND SUITABLE ACCOMMODATION FOR GYPSIES AND TRAVELLERS
(1) It shall be the duty of every local authority, being a district council, the council of a metropolitan district or London borough, or unitary authority, to exercise their powers under section 24 of the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960 (c. 62) (power of local authorities to provide sites for caravans) so far as may be necessary to provide, or to facilitate the provision of, adequate and suitable accommodation to meet the needs of Gypsies and Travellers residing in or resorting to their area.
(2) Where it appears to a local authority that any other authority could, by taking any specified action, help in the discharge of their duty under subsection (1), they may request the help of that other authority specifying the action in question.
(3) An authority whose help is so requested under subsection (2) shall comply with the request if it is compatible with their own statutory or other duties and obligations and does not unduly prejudice the discharge of any of their functions.
(4) The Secretary of State may, if at any time it appears to him to be necessary to do so, give directions to any local authority to which subsection (1) applies requiring them to provide, or facilitate the provision of, pursuant to subsection (1), such sites or additional sites, for the accommodation of such numbers of caravans, as may be specified in the directions; and any such directions shall be enforceable, on the application of the Secretary of State, by mandatory order.
(5) In subsection (1) "accommodation" includes temporary stopping places as well as permanent accommodation, and in subsection (3) "other authority" means any local authority, including a county council, district council, the council of a metropolitan district or London borough or unitary authority.
(6) Section 24 of the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960 is amended as follows.
(7) In subsection (2)(c), for "gipsies" substitute "Gypsies and Travellers".
(8) In subsection (8) for "gipsies" substitute the following definition—
"Gypsies and Travellers" is defined as follows—
"Gypsies" means Romany Gypsies;
"Travellers" means—
(a) Irish Travellers,
(b) members of ethnic groups for whom living in a caravan is part of their traditional way of life, or
(c) persons of nomadic habit of life, whatever their race or origin.""
The noble Lord said: This amendment is not about the restoration of a statutory duty, as in the Caravan Sites Act 1968, where local authorities were obliged to provide accommodation for all Gypsies residing or resorting to their area, but simply seeks to provide that they exercise their powers under the 1960 Act so far as may be necessary to provide the sites themselves or to facilitate the provision of adequate and suitable accommodation for the needs of Gypsies and Travellers. I shall explain that this is not nearly as onerous a duty as it was in the 1968 Act.
The Government have wisely decided that the accommodation needs of Gypsies should be dealt with from 2005 onwards as part of the process of housing needs assessment, as Keith Hill told the ODPM Select Committee on 13 July. Therefore, it is useful to see how planning and housing policies for Gypsies will fit together. The assessments by local housing authorities,
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which have to be conducted in accordance with the methodology that is laid down in the revised ODPM guidance now being developed by the University of Cambridge, and quality assured by the regional housing boards, will be aggregated into the regional spatial strategy and that will indicate the number of pitches required over a five-year period in the area of each authority. So under this framework we can assume that there will be sufficient land specified in local development documents to meet the accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers.
For the first time, presumably, we shall know something about the transfers of Gypsy and Traveller families into and out of settled accommodation because that will be an obvious part of the needs assessment. In many of these debates, there is an unspoken assumption that Gypsies are permanently immured on their caravan sites, but the reality is that a large number of Gypsy families already live in housing and there is some movement in both directions.
For the past five years, ever since Chris Mullin was the responsible Minister at the DETR, I have tried to persuade the Government to get local authorities to record such movements. We need to know more about the preferences of these communities and to offer them the same variety of choices, including ordinary housing and group housing, pioneered in the Republic of Ireland but ignored by the ODPM, as are available to people who live in settled accommodation.
The majority of Gypsies and Travellers would like to continue living a traditional way of life, although about 80 per cent of them want to stay on one site, either out of choice or necessity. As there is a shortage of some 4,000 pitches in England, a family that gains a pitch on a permanent site tends to stick to it, even if their inclination is still to travel.
The question is who will develop the sites that are needed. It was clear from the replies given by Mr Hill in evidence to the ODPM Select Committee on 13 July that he was thinking that the vast majority of travellers would provide their own sites and that registered social landlords would come in only as an afterthought. He said that placing a duty on local authorities,
"would put Gypsies and Travellers arguably in an advantageous position by comparison with other local residents with housing needs . . . the introduction of the duty does not really sit comfortably with our policy of expanding areas of choice, discretion and decision making amongst local authorities".
There is plenty of evidence to show that Gypsies want to develop their own sites in the form of the increasing number of planning applications and appeals by people from the Gypsy community. In the year to 31 March 2004, Gypsies lodged 118 appeals against refusal of planning permissions of which they won 49. However, many of those were for temporary permissions, according to Dr Donald Kenrick, to whom I am indebted for the figures and with whose work I believe the department is familiar. I believe that it has been acknowledged that he is the foremost expert on the matter in the country. Dr Kenrick points out that if private sites were gained at the rate experienced in 2003, it would take 27 years for enough to be
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provided to those living on unauthorised sites and that is without making any allowance for new household formations in the Gypsy community.
Most of the refusals were because the land is in unsuitable locations, such as green belt, as was shown in "Tonight with Trevor McDonald", the week before last. That programme also demonstrated that the applicants have no choice. There is a long queue for places on even the most appalling public sites—under motorways or next to sewage farms—and the alternative is a periodic struggle against the bailiffs and the police. There are few willing sellers of land. However, if vendors could have obtained planning permission for some more profitable form of development, they would not have sold the land to Gypsies.
The transactions tend to reflect that lack of apparent development potential. When the new planning system is in force, and land is designated as suitable for a Gypsy site, presumably its value will be that much greater and correspondingly fewer Gypsies will have the resources to buy the land. I put that point in a letter to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on 20 July, but I gather that the letter went astray. I have only recently re-sent it, so I am not blaming him for not having yet replied. The matter needs careful consideration.
Gypsies may be able to get planning consent more readily under the new regime, but will probably have to pay a lot more for it; indeed, some will be priced out of the market. The Minister may say that is no different from the situation of low-income house dwellers who cannot afford to buy their own properties, but in their case there are other options available: privately rented accommodation, or housing provided by registered social landlords. Neither of those agencies will deal with Gypsies.
The Novas Ouvertures group would like to develop sites and group housing and may well make some contribution; however, there are no other RSLs queuing up to offer their services, and no private landlords on the horizon either. That is why, for low-income families—hundreds of them now statutorily homeless—the duty of local authorities to provide or facilitate embodied in this amendment is so essential.
The Minister said, in his reply to question 321 in the ODPM Select Committee, that the amendment would have "significant spending implications". However, if he is right in thinking that nearly all Gypsies would prefer to own their own site, and they have the money and they can get planning permission, the demand for new pitches on local authority sites would be modest. Last January, there were 3,700 caravans on unauthorised sites. If only 10 per cent of them cannot afford to buy land and develop it as a site of their own, the local authorities would only need to provide 20 new sites in the whole of England, the cost of which might possibly amount to 0.1 per cent of the ODPM's budget, even if all the sites were provided in one year. Against that could be set the considerable cost of evictions, which would then be a thing of the past. It took 40 bailiffs from Gypsy and squatter eviction specialists Constant and Co. to evict
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Gypsies from the Bulkington site in Warwickshire in June, at an estimated cost of £150,000, one of a number of evictions on a similar scale so far this year.
If there is to be no duty to provide, how does the ODPM expect local authorities to meet their obligations to Gypsies under the Homelessness Act 2002? As the noble Lord knows, a Gypsy family is homeless under the Housing Act 1996 if their caravan is on an unauthorised site and there is nowhere they are entitled to put it. The Homelessness Act 2002 requires local authorities to ensure that sufficient accommodation is available for people who may become homeless in their area. If, as the courts have decided, Gypsies with a cultural aversion to bricks and mortar cannot be put into bed and breakfasts would they not have to commission more sites in order to comply with the law?
I realise that all those matters will become clearer when the ODPM publishes the outcome of its review that has been going on since early this year, and that the noble Lord may not be in a position to say much this afternoon. We are told that that outcome is not likely to appear before mid-October—in fact, roughly at the same time as the Select Committee on the ODPM publishes its own report.
Another matter of great importance arises out of discussion in the ODPM Select Committee in the consultations the ODPM has undertaken: the question of the definition of "Gypsies and Travellers" that has to be drafted to replace the existing one in the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960. There, Gypsies—then spelt "gipsies", with a small "g"—were defined as
That, however, urgently needs to be updated.
First, as already noted, most Gypsies and Travellers are no longer nomadic. Secondly, the courts have decided, in the case of Berry, that a person who gives up travelling, for whatever reason, ceases to be a Gypsy. If that were to be applied strictly, any family allocated a pitch on a local authority Gypsy site would cease to be entitled to live there if it were known that they had decided to stay there permanently. The same would apply to an Irish Traveller in a similar position.
Gypsies and Irish Travellers are minorities, recognised as such for the purposes of race relations registration. Their separate needs for health and education services, for example, as well as for accommodation, have to be dealt with so as to secure their equality with other sections of the community under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. The Court of Appeal's decision in the Berry case has to be corrected while the opportunity is before the House.
We therefore define "Gypsies" in the new clause by their ethnicity, making no distinction between those who still keep to their ancient way of life and those who decide to settle down permanently, whether on a site or in bricks and mortar. Travellers can be either Irish Travellers, to whom the same reasoning applies, members of other ethnic groups for whom living in a caravan is part of their traditional way of life, or, as before, persons of a nomadic habit of life.
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The definition would not increase the number of families wishing to live on Gypsy caravan sites. We believe there are very few families now settled in housing who would seek to revert to living in caravans if that were made easier for them than at present, and they would be counterbalanced by an equal number of families moving in the opposite direction. If more Gypsies living in houses did want to move on to the sites, and vice versa, that much housing would be released for the benefit of other applicants. I know the ODPM's concern with a statutory duty is mainly on the grounds of cost, and I hope these arguments will help to alleviate that anxiety.
I welcome the review of Gypsy policy that has been conducted by the ODPM, including the consultations at a number of seminars in the spring. I attended one in Derbyshire, and I think the ODPM found it useful as a means of exploring the main issues and ascertaining the latest views of stakeholders. In addition, I had a meeting with Yvette Cooper, the then Minister, at the beginning of March, and I am sure your Lordships would like to join me in sending our best wishes to Ms Cooper on the recent birth of her daughter, which has meant that her duties have been taken over for the time being by Mr Keith Hill.
I sent a 3,000-word memorandum to Ms Cooper, a couple of days after I met her in March, covering the main points raised, as well as supplementary letters on 6 and 27 March, covering the problems of definition that I have just discussed, and reviewing the Wrexham and Basildon cases. At that time, it was expected that the outcome of the review would be published in July, as Ms Cooper herself had said tentatively at the launch of the IPPR paper on Gypsy policy in January. However, the date has slipped for the second time, now that Keith Hill has appeared before the Select Committee.
I understand that the ODPM may not want to risk criticism by publishing the outcome of its review before the Select Committee reports in mid-October, but, like everybody else who has looked at the subject recently, the ODPM Select Committee is almost certain to recommend the restoration of a statutory duty in some form. As that is the policy of not only the Select Committee but also of the National Farmers Union, the Local Government Association and the other authorities who have looked into the matter, I hope at least we shall have some encouragement from the Minister this afternoon that the statutory duty in the form outlined in this proposed new clause will be restored. I beg to move.
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