Localism Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Reay, has just said that planning is a matter of getting the balance right. My amendment attempts to do that in the case of Gypsies and Travellers, the purpose being to ensure that caravan-dwelling Gypsies and Travellers have somewhere to live. There are 18,300 who retain a strong cultural aversion to housing which is left over from the days when the whole Gypsy population was nomadic. Of these, some 3,000 now live in unauthorised developments or encampments, so that almost one in five of the population is statutorily homeless. That proportion had begun to decline over the past three years as a result of circular 01/06 and the establishment of target figures for planning permissions for Gypsy sites in every district of England through a three-stage process. First, there were the Gypsy and Traveller accommodation needs assessments, conducted by experts on behalf of local authorities; secondly, public inquiries on the results of those assessments; and, thirdly, a review at the regional level providing that a minimum of 15 pitches were to be provided in every district, regardless of assessed need and reducing the number in some authorities which had more than a proportionate existing population of Gypsies, such as Basildon in Essex. As your Lordships may have seen, 90 families are being evicted from the Dale Farm site in that borough, while other local authorities in the county have been avoiding planning for any Gypsy sites up till now. This is an emergency situation which could only be solved by allowing the families who are to be evicted to relocate on to publicly owned land in the neighbourhood where temporary planning permission could be sought pending a permanent solution. Otherwise, these 90 families will be thrown onto the roadside, with all the trauma and disruption that that would involve for them, especially the children. I repeat the suggestion I made to my noble friend Lady Wilcox that some of the land that is to be transferred by the regional development agencies to the Homes and Communities Agency could be earmarked for Gypsy sites because, if by some miracle the amendment were to be accepted, having the right numbers in plans would be no guarantee that local authorities would be able or willing to identify the tiny amounts of land to satisfy the need. This would be a possible immediate solution to the Basildon problem. Amending the purposes for which RDA land is to be used would be a simple matter, if there was political will. The previous system was intended to satisfy local residents that, much as they objected to having Gypsies and Travellers in their neighbourhood, the small number they were being asked to accept was reasonable and had been worked out carefully and methodically, with a view to eliminating the unauthorised encampments that are a legitimate cause of complaint—not only against the homeless Gypsies but against Governments motivated by cowardice and barely concealed hostility towards Gypsies and Travellers. Just as the Bill makes an exception for major infrastructure projects, we believe that a different approach is necessary—albeit for different reasons in the case of planning for Gypsy and Traveller sites. Left to their own devices, local authorities will never make adequate provision for the number of Gypsies and Travellers who still live in caravans, in spite of all the obstacles that they have to face—as proved by the experience of the past half century. I had understood that the coalition would concentrate on the matters that had been agreed between the two parties. Leaving aside the points on which there were differences, tearing up the whole strategy for dealing with Gypsies and Travellers was a denial of that promise. However, the numbers remain. Therefore, in the amendment we reinforce the numbers by requiring every local authority to grant planning permission for a specified number of pitches. In the case of the two regions where the numbers were in a completed regional strategy, those are the numbers. In the two regions where the penultimate stage had been reached, of a report by the independent panel, the numbers are those in the panel report; and in the remaining regions, we take the numbers that were in the GTAAs. We should have specified the minimum of 15 pitches for every local authority, but this can be added at Report stage if the Government agree to this amendment in principle. Amendment 170C provides that the same numbers should be a ““material consideration”” in determining planning appeals in respect of Gypsy sites in the relevant authorities. That is not my preferred choice, but if we make no reference to the numbers at all, we already know what is going to happen. A report by the Irish Travellers Movement in Britain, a copy of which I sent to the Minister last week, details the responses of 100 local authorities in three different regions to inquiries about their pitch targets. In the east of England, the targets were 36 per cent below those in the regional strategy; in the south-west, the reduction was 32 per cent compared with the emerging regional strategy; and in the south-east, it was 82 per cent. Overall, there was a reduction of just over half in the plans, and there was widespread delay and uncertainty about how to proceed. This research confirms with a vengeance the fear, expressed by the CLG Select Committee in another place in its report of 28 February, that, "““abolition of RSSs will reduce the provision of sites for Gypsies and Travellers and make it harder for local authorities to share out sites over an area larger than the local authority””." The committee quoted with approval the written evidence they had from six different sets of witnesses, all asserting that the planning vacuum would have an adverse effect on the provision of sites, and effectively saying that over the longer term the new framework, or rather the lack of any framework, would mean an increase in the number of unauthorised sites. It gives me a feeling of déjà vu, from the similarly predictable disaster of 1994, when the 1968 Act was repealed. I said then—several times—that repeal would have a disastrous effect on the provision of sites, and so it did. I now say, without fear of reasoned contradiction, that without this amendment many local authorities will not grant permission for any sites whatever, as the Mayor of London, for example, has indicated. In his draft London Plan under the previous system, 524 extra pitches were to be provided. That was then reduced in March 2010, close to the election, to 236 and then in October he scrapped the numbers altogether, leaving the boroughs to decide their own strategies, if any. The replies from individual authorities to the ITMB survey showed that many had taken advantage of the new freedom to reduce targets but many more had just not bothered to adopt targets at all because of alleged shortcomings in the evidence based in the GTAAs, abandonment of the 15 minimum, what was locally acceptable or that they were waiting for the replacement of circular 01/06, which I believe is about to appear. During this hiatus, since the Secretary of State’s unlawful letter scrapping the previous Government’s planning strategy, almost all the new Gypsy sites have been provided only as a result of successful appeals against the refusal of applications by the Gypsies themselves. As we have heard, that process is now to be stopped. The question now before us is not just whether this amendment should be passed, but whether this Committee will tell the Government that they have taken a wrong turn in their whole policy for Gypsies and Travellers, condemning yet another generation to exclusion and deprivation. It pains me intensely to say this about the coalition, which I have otherwise supported through difficult times since the last election, but this is an issue I have fought over the past five decades and I am convinced that leaving the right to adequate housing for these communities in the hands of local authorities—at the mercy of the implacably hostile electorate—is a recipe for certain failure. We are under investigation by the UN rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing for the treatment of the evictees on the Dale Farm site, but as I have already emphasised to her the question goes much further than that. Over the decades we have been unwilling to take the action needed to ensure that Gypsies and Travellers have a lawful place to live, in breach of our obligations under Articles 11.1 and 2.2 of the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. The Government may not care about the few critics who argue this cause in Parliament, but if they want to avoid the humiliation of being pilloried before the UN Human Rights Council, this is their opportunity. I beg to move.