If Burnham really cared about fairness, he’d send travellers to Labour-voting cities
If Burnham really cared about fairness, he’d send travellers to Labour-voting cities
Clive AsletTue, August 18, 2026 at 8:40 AM UTC
0
It isn’t always so easy to evict determined Travellers, who have sometimes staged pitched battles with the police - Alamy
While small boat crossings may be down, the number of unauthorised Traveller caravans across England is up – since 2020 there has been a rise of 73 per cent. Admittedly, the issue is smaller, but their impact can seem much greater to people living nearby them, largely in the countryside.
Enter Angela Rayner. Travellers have every right to be in Britain: they are a protected minority. But problems can arise when they seek to establish a new base. Other householders must abide rigorously by the planning system: Travellers regularly drive a caravan and horses through it, entrenching themselves in places where permission to build dwellings would never normally be given. Rayner’s change to planning rules threaten to make it easier for such sites to become permanent, and inevitably the greatest impact will be on the countryside.
It can go like this. First, someone buys a few fields from a farmer, denying any intention to build on them. Then, an application for hard standing and drains is delivered to the planning office on the Friday before a bank holiday. As the planners enjoy their long-weekend barbecues, convoys of lorries and diggers arrive. By the time the bureaucrats have returned to work, the site has been flattened, concrete poured and caravans installed.
Don’t think canary-coloured caravans, as in The Wind in the Willows; these are often luxury vehicles of the Winnebago type equivalent to hotel suites on wheels. There is a chance the site will be allowed to stay. If not, the slow grinding of the law means it will be several years before it can be closed down, after much trouble and expense to local opponents.
Advertisement
This is what happened at Meriden in the Midlands in 2013. When I went to the camp, I was charmed by the man who met me in a dashing Jensen Interceptor that he had restored. Illiterate himself, he wanted his children to go to school – an ambition enhanced by observing the eloquence of the barristers in court. Inevitably the judgment went against him. His band of 14 caravans moved on and dispersed.
It isn’t always so easy to evict determined Travellers, who have sometimes staged pitched battles with the police. Only 0.1pc of the general population, by some estimates they account for 5pc of the prison population. The killers of PC Andrew Harper were found hiding at a Travellers site in Berkshire.
But on top of fears about crime and bad behaviour, the prevailing local concern is often about fairness. Residents who could not get permission to turn a bungalow into an office by adding a few shelves are left furious that entire illegal encampments can seem to get away with it. Being in the green belt makes matters worse.
Blots of the landscape do not worry Rayner, who has relaxed the environmental regulations – perhaps because the landscape concerned is in the countryside, which Labour MPs rarely visit. Hence beautiful villages are expected to house immigrant hostels.
It is also somewhat ironic. Only recently Andy Burnham suggested that more asylum seekers should be sent to middle-class areas, supposedly to more fairly share the burden. In a spirit of evenhandedness, I’d like to propose that travellers’ sites are relocated to urban areas, perhaps with a Labour MP. There are a few I can think of in London and Manchester.
Source: “AOL Breaking”
