Hopes rise as controversial 'calling in' of green belt Traveller site appeals is challenged in High Court
A special report
By MIKE DOHERTY
Above: Communities Minister Eric Pickles (inset) will be challenged in the High Court for his policy on Traveller site appeals.
GYPSIES and Travellers across the UK are waiting on tenterhooks for the outcome of a crucial High Court challenge to Secretary of State Eric Pickles’, controversial policy of ‘calling in’ and predominantly overturning His own Planning Inspector’s recommendations to allow Traveller site planning appeals.
On the 10thJune one Romany Gypsy and three Irish Traveller families are in the High Court launching a Judicial Review of the Secretary of State’s policy of ‘calling in’ Traveller site appeals for personal determination. The families are saying that the policy is discriminatory, breaks the Equalities Act and ignores the Government’s own planning policy.
The case is highly significant for Gypsy and Traveller families wanting to provide for themselves by finding somewhere to live and settle, and who are being failed by local councils who are consistently failing to earmark land for potential Traveller sites as part of their Local plan. With Councils still not delivering sites or putting aside land on which sites can be built, many Gypsies and Travellers have been buying bits of land; sometimes on green belt, and developing Traveller sites for themselves. The lack of available sites alongside individual families need for access to health services and schools are often used as legal arguments to back the planning applications for a Traveller site.
Yet despite these arguments, which are considered valid in planning policy and case law, most are turned down by local authority planning committees. When the initial application is turned down, the Travellers can then appeal to the Department for Communities and Local Government Planning Inspectorate. Planning experts for the Travellers claim that Eric Pickles is unlawfully interfering in this process by determining the appeal using criteria beyond current legislation.
Dr Angus Murdoch, a planning expert representing one of the families, says: “By ‘calling in’ and paying ‘particular scrutiny’ to single pitch Gypsy and Traveller Green Belt Appeals such as the Claimant’s, the Secretary of State has discriminated against Gypsies and Travellers and breached the public-sector equality duty. The Secretary of State is not calling in Appeals relating to single ‘bricks and mortar’ dwelling houses and in my view there is no justification for this difference in treatment.”
Bridget Doran is one of the Travellers who are challenging the Secretary of State. Her appeal for planning permission to be granted for a small family site in Sevenoaks, Kent, was dismissed by Eric Pickles against the recommendations of his own DCLG planning inspector. Bridget Doran, her husband, sons and grandchildren, fled a large overcrowded local authority site when the conditions on it became untenable for them eight years ago, and “sunk every penny they had” into where they live now. They have been embroiled in the UK planning system ever since. Bridget’s husband died last year because, she says, “of the stress of it all.”
“We get on with everyone in the village’” she says. “All our children are in the primary school and the high school and when the news about our appeal was in the papers all the children were asking our little ones whether that meant they would have to move and how sad that would be.”
“People in the village and the local shops and pubs are angry with Mr Pickles and offering to write letters to him asking him to let us stay. If we have to move it will be back on the road. We are not moving back onto the local authority site. It’s too rough.”
Bridget Doran says that it is “unfair” that the Secretary of State intervened in the appeal and ignored the decision of the planning inquiry. “He went over their heads because he doesn’t like Travellers, but he is being unfair to the local community as well –because they want us to stay.”
The ‘calling in’ policy, which was officially announced by Local Government Minister Brandon Lewis in July last year, but that has been in de-facto operation since the Coalition Government took power in late 2010, has meant that hundreds of Gypsy and Traveller families have had their planning appeals dismissed and many more have been left waiting for decisions for months and sometimes years.
Recent research by Jo Gregson for South West Law shows that when decisions have been left in the hands of Government Planning Inspectors, the number of upheld appeals has risen from 43% in 2010 to 51% in 2013. However, the same is not true for appeals decided directly by the Secretary of State and head of the DCLG. In 2010, Eric Pickles upheld 64% of appeals, but in 2011 this dropped to 15% and has remained around that mark ever since, meaning that since 2011, Eric Pickles has dismissed 101 out of 121 Gypsy and Traveller site appeals, a figure which includes dismissing 38 out of 51 green belt appeals. The figures do not include appeals which are “sitting on his desk waiting for a decision” – a number described as “over a hundred” by planning expert Alison Heine.
One Traveller family from Enfield who are “praying” for the Judicial Review to succeed are the Delaneys from Enfield, Greater London. Jim and Elizabeth Delaney wanted to move out of bricks and mortar housing and live with their daughters and grandchildren as a self supporting extended family; a cultural norm amongst Travellers. The Delaneys brought some land; a former wholesale plant nursery, in the run-down and partially developed part of the Enfield green belt, and then applied for planning permission to turn it into a residential Traveller site.
Elizabeth Delaney was brought up on the Enfield local authority site that was closed in 1989. Although they were promised a new site with improved amenities, Enfield Council never built another site and many of the former residents now live in social housing.
“We were hoodwinked,” says Elizabeth Delaney. “Most of the residents now live in housing and all of them would do anything to move back onto a site. They feel isolated living in houses. They (Enfield Council) promised us a new site with kitchens, washing machines so you won’t have to go to the launderette. They closed down a perfectly good site with people forced into flats, some people were given money to move out, and the promised site was never built and never will be.”
Jim and Elizabeth Delaney are now currently homeless and living in a camper van, their daughters are living in council accommodation and their two grandchildren from one daughter – the Delaneys are the legal guardians – move between the Delaneys and their daughter, with Jim and Elizabeth taking the children to school in the morning and collecting them in the afternoon.
Their planning application was rejected by Enfield planning committee in April 2013, although another planning application for four five-bedroom detached houses on the former King’s Oak Nursery in Tingey’s Top Lane, also on green belt land, had been approved by councillors shortly before at the same planning hearing. Members of the Crew Hill Residents Association, formed with the specific aim of opposing the Delaneys' planning application and now disbanded, were at the hearing. After the hearing, Peter Jeffery, the Chairman of the Association said to the Enfield Advertiser: “We had strongly opposed the application and applaud the committee for continuing to enforce the no-residential policy for the green belt.”
“The hearing was awful,” says Elizabeth Delaney. “The objectors had a big book in the pub and the landlord was asking anyone who came in to sign it. Sixty of them turned up to the planning hearing and were shouting, interrupting and talking about us like we were a disease. They said we were ruining the countryside and saying to the planning officers –‘would you want them in your back garden?’.”
“After the appeal hearing, the planning inspector had arranged to come with us to see the ground,” says Elizabeth Delaney. “There were about twenty of the objectors already at the top of the lane. They had got there before us. They walked with us and the inspector up to our gates and demanded to come in to our yard. He said that they had no right to do that.”
“How can they say we destroy the area?” says Elizabeth Delaney. “Within one square mile there are two rubbish transfer stations, three scaffolding yards, one industrial estate, one scrap yard, one lorry park , one paper recycling yard, a tyre fitting factory , a plant hire yard, a builders yard, one row of broken down glass houses, three car repair units and a car spray shop. How can they say that our home would be an eye-sore?”
“There was no legitimate planning reason to turn down the Delaneys' application,” says Alison Heine, the Delaney's planning consultant. “There was already a precedent set for residential development in that area. Ironically it adjoins four other mobile homes occupied residentially as well as the new housing agreed further down the lane. Mr Pickles did not call that application in. This is a classic case of unequal treatment.”
“Their planning appeal is now sitting on Eric Pickles’ desk, one of many – maybe even a hundred,” she says. “We don’t know what the recommendation from the planning inspector was and we won’t find that out until we have the decision, but Pickles has been routinely overruling his inspectors who, at the end of the day, are simply applying the law and applying planning legislation. I wonder how they feel about having a Secretary of State interfering with their work and potentially breaking planning and equalities law for the sake of what appears to be an anti-Traveller agenda.”