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Eviction Moratorium Call Goes to Brussels

Ustiben Report
By Grattan Puxon
November 3, 2007

Dale Farm spokesman Richard Sheridan has gone to Brussels this week to garner support for his campaign to stop Basildon from bulldozing the UK’s biggest Gypsy community.

In company with Gypsy representative Joseph Jones, he will also be lobbying for a moratorium on all evictions until more trailer parks are available across Britain and the rest of Europe.

The conference at the European Parliament is expected to adopt guidelines for the social inclusion of some ten million Roma and Travellers living within 27-state European Union.

“We’ve been excluded for centuries,” said Sheridan, before his departure. “This is our chance to lay down a blue-print for a better future.”

But he said his first objective was to draw attention to what he describes as Basildon council’s policy of ethnic-cleansing. The council has voted to spend some five million euros to “clear” up to 150 so-called unauthorised Gypsy families from the district.

Last month, the council participated in the hounding of twenty-five Traveller families who attempted several times to set-up camp within the borough. They were evicted under the notorious s61 of the Criminal Justice Act, which effectively outlaws the Gypsy way of life.

"The police moved us five times in three days," said Patrick Gammell. "Where can we live? We were evicted from our own land last year and have been chased from place to place ever since."

Dozens of trailer parks and private yards have been destroyed in the past five years by local authorities. Many employ Constant & Co., a bailiff outfit which uses heavy-handed tactics.

Constant & Co. have ploughed up the model Woodside community in Bedfordshire, burned trailers for Chelmsford council and evicted Travellers from scores of locations. The bill for this work amounts to over 25 million euros per year.

The Brussels conference is the termination of a five-year  programme to encourage co-operation between member states in the fight against social exclusion of Gypsies, as laid down in the Amsterdam Treaty in 2002.

It follows a joint statement by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights and UN Special Rapporteur in October which deplored forced evictions and the marginalization of Roma and Travellers, not least in Britain.

Supporting the statement, a group of leading NGOs, including the European Roma Rights Centre and Greek Helsinki Watch, drew attention to the threat of eviction at Dale Farm. It said Basildon had again rejected an appeal for planning permission and had already destroyed a dozen homes at nearby Hovefields.

Meanwhile, the Travellers at Dale Farm are now refusing to provide any further personal information about their families. They say Basildon council has already breached the UK Data Protection Act by placing health and social benefit details on a website.

Currently, three Traveller families are suing the council for both material and punitive damages. If these test cases are successful, a class-action suit could follow which could cost Basildon taxpayers a million euros in costs and damages.

Officials are up the creek due to the information boycott as they need the new data for a council meeting next month (December) in preparation for a judicial review of their eviction plans, due to be heard in the high court on February 11.

Solicitors have advised Travellers not to cooperate with council staff. They point out that while the enforcement order against the 86 homes at Dale Farm still stands, collection of welfare details can have no benefit for them.

"This is just ticking a box," says Kathleen McCarthy, spokesperson for Dale Farm Housing Association. "This request for personal details is an abuse of our privacy. It is not being done for our good."

Dale Farm has been under siege for seven years. Half of the one thousand Travellers who own yards have been granted planning permission while the rest face eviction because their homes are on greenbelt land.

But Mrs McCarthy says the land was nothing but a giant scrap-yard when Travellers first purchased the site.

Former deputy prime-minster John Prescot has suggested a solution to the issue through provision of an alternative home for the Travellers at nearby Pitsea. However, an initial planning application by the Travellers' own housing association has been rejected.

"We've done a hundred planning applications and gone through five public inquiries," says Richard Sheridan. "They say we're illegal but turn down every attempt we make to get permits."

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