A CAMPAIGNER for the traveller community has said more caravan sites are needed but warned councils avoid them like the plague.
Gypsy Council director Joseph Jones said it was a “guaranteed fact” district and borough councils needed to do more to provide permanent sites.
� SWNS.comGypsy Council director Joseph Jones says more sites are needed for travellers[/caption]
Legislation was introduced last year allowing local authorities to evict, fine or arrest travellers setting up unauthorised camps.
Jones though says councils should have established more sites before the new laws were introduced.
He said: “A lot of these councils have failed in provision – we need more sites, that’s a guaranteed fact.”
Under the government guidelines, local authorities are encouraged to: “Formulate their own evidence base for Gypsy and Traveller needs, provide their own targets relating to pitches required, and identify a suitable five-year supply to meet those needs.”
Councils in Kent said they had either met or exceeded the target number of pitches that had been set, reports KentOnline.
Labour’s Satinder Shokar, a Medway councillor for Strood West, claims the number between these objective and official caravan counts do not add up.
Maidstone Council has 273 private pitches as well as another 32 pitches across the two sites it owns.
This far above its goal of providing 187 pitches for the period 2011 to 2031.
However, a count undertaken in January this year in Maidstone found there were 725 caravans on authorised pitches, including those that are privately owned, and another 152 on unauthorised pitches.
Speaking about Medway, Cllr Shokar said: “Unfortunately under the previous administration, they had the report of how many pitches they needed in Medway but in their local [development] plan they didn’t even include that.
“The local plan didn’t even end up happening, but at that consultation stage they didn’t take on the professional advice to provide those pitches.”
Maidstone recently published a new local plan for 2023 to 2040.
It found there was a need for another 340 pitches.
However, the council said those figures “are not necessarily a need for pitches on additional sites” because of the “natural turnover of pitches over time”.
In a study for Maidstone carried out by Opinion Research Services (ORS), a professional body that conducts Gypsy and Traveller accommodation assessments across the country, it found: “Some assessments of need make use of pitch turnover as an ongoing component of supply.
“ORS do not agree with this approach or about making any assumptions about annual turnover rates.
“This approach frequently ends up significantly under-estimating need as, in the majority of cases, vacant pitches on sites are not available to meet any local need.”
Other local authorities in the county, such as Swale, do not have a council-owned site.
The borough has the second-highest Gypsy, Romany and Traveller (GRT) population in Kent with 350 caravans, according to the survey at the start of this year, but its only public site is owned by Kent County Council.
Jones said: “There were 30-odd families living on church marshes [in Sittingbourne] and when that was shut down they asked people to go in temporary housing until they built a new site.
“That never developed and that still hasn’t developed.
“That’s what the problem is – the local borough councils are avoiding it like the plague.”
In general, the Local Government Association advises councils to involve Gypsies and Travellers in the planning process; consult with GRT communities early and often; be transparent to build trust; and integrate GRT accommodation needs into new planning systems.
It says: “Moving Gypsies and Travellers on from one district to another doesn’t solve the overall problem of a lack of sites.”
AlamyJones says councils should have established more sites before the new laws were introduced[/caption] Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
