Minister Pickles deals personally with green belt Traveller appeals

Above: Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, in a publicity photograph released by his Department. Pickles will personally scrutinise several appeals made by Travellers in the green belt. Picture: Communities and Local Government Office via Wikimedia Commons

By Damian Le Bas, Editor

ERIC Pickles, the State Secretary for Communities, will be personally deciding whether several Travellers who have appealed against planning decisions in the green belt will get their permission or face refusal.

In a move unlikely to be welcomed either by Gypsy and Traveller organisations or individuals, Mr Pickles will “recover” for his own decision several appeals which would normally be decided by planning inspectors.

Pickles, who last month won praise in the right wing press for tailing a group of Travellers in his car before helping police to eject them from an Essex cricket pitch, has also brought in the prospect of unlimited fines for those who set up unauthorised encampments.

The DCLG has said that 11 appeal cases have been recovered for Mr Pickles’s decision so far.

The Planning website Planning Resource has reported that consultants acting for those making appeals “say that the hold-ups are causing hardship for their clients”.

Traveller sites have repeatedly been targeted by the current government as “inappropriate development” for green belt areas.

This has been in spite of estimates that a single square mile of land would be enough to provide a pitch for every Gypsy or Traveller in the country who currently has nowhere legal to stay.

In a written statement to parliament last week, Brandon Lewis of the DCLG elaborated on the policy document, “Planning Policy for Traveller Sites”, which was issued by the Department in March 2012.

“It makes it clear that both temporary and permanent traveller sites are inappropriate development in the green belt and that planning decisions should protect green belt land from such inappropriate development,” said Lewis, the current Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

Conservative ministers continue to remain silent on the irony of their bringing in new measures to prevent Travellers from setting up their own sites.

The abolition of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, which countered unauthorised encampments by giving councils a duty to provide legal sites, was abolished in 1994 by the Conservatives under John Major.