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Letter to Comissioner
Sir Al Aynsley-Green,
Children's Commissioner,
1 London Bridge,
London SE1 9BG.
18 September 2008.
Dear Commissioner,
I am writing to you to raise serious concerns about the welfare of children at the Dale Farm Travellers' site near Cray's Hill in Basildon District in Essex.
Dale Farm is the largest unauthorised Travellers' site in Britain. Families living on authorised pitches on the site have been joined over recent years by families evicted from other unauthorised sites. Their circumstances are proof of the serious shortage of authorised pitches for Gypsies and Travellers.
Children on the site, who have suffered from past evictions and the continuing uncertainty of living in an unauthorised location, face a very traumatic future. Basildon Council is determined to evict all those living on unauthorised pitches on the site. The outcome, announced in May this year, of a Judicial Review of the Council's decision to evict, was that the Council could carry out the eviction but not before it had provided authorised pitches in the District sufficient to meet the needs identified in the East of England's Regional Spatial Strategy. The Council has challenged this decision, and an appeal will be heard this December. If the decision is in the Council's favour, residents at Dale Farm will face eviction early in 2009 with nowhere to go.
The Traveller Law Reform Project is concerned that the wellbeing of the Dale Farm children will be disproportionately affected by eviction, especially given that many of them are happily settled in the local primary school and benefiting from it. Eviction from Dale Farm with no alternative accommodation to which to go will mean unauthorised stopping on the roadside and consequent repeated evictions.
But there is another serious concern about the practicalities of eviction. Basildon Council has proposed using the services of Constant and Co Bailiffs, who have a very poor record of heavy-handedness in Gypsy and Traveller site evictions, acting in a reckless manner which has endangered the safety of children. Site evictions involving the use of heavy machinery and the destruction of dwellings and other property are not supposed to be carried out with children on site, but Constant and Co have ignored this requirement in the past and site residents have feared that they will ignore them in the case of Dale Farm.
Apparently in order to calm residents' fears, I understand that Essex County Council has made another alarming proposal. I understand that social services will be asked to round up children from the site and remove them until the eviction is complete and their parents are in a position to collect them from whatever holding centre they have been taken to.
We are aware that Essex County Council would require a court order before taking children into care. But we are also aware that the Chief Constable has the power to authorise the taking of children for their own protection. Essex County Council has issued a statement saying that 'offsite accommodation will be available on the day (of the eviction) to ensure that children are not caught up in any enforcement action.' By whom and under what circumstances children would be taken to this accommodation has not been explained, and we are not at all satisfied.
This raises three issues.
1) Neither parents nor children are likely to be happy to welcome social workers who have come to remove children without consent in order to facilitate a violent and destructive eviction which residents have been resisting by every legal means for years – even if, in the minds of the social workers involved, they are doing so in order to protect the children from harm. The site is large, and if children are not happy to be taken, they are likely to run away from the social workers. The possibility of completing the operation without ugly scenes, which may themselves damage the children, is low.
2) Once the eviction is complete, the parents will be legally homeless. Residents fear that they will on this ground be denied access to their children when they go to collect them from the holding centre, and that the children will be taken into care.
3) Some also fear, on the basis of past experience, that they may be allowed to collect their children only on the condition that they leave the county and not return, thus tearing the children away from their familiar school and health care provision as well as rendering them homeless.
Given the severe shortage of authorised pitches in England, the Traveller Law Reform Project believes that the proposed eviction is itself disproportionate and that the practical arrangements apparently being proposed in order to facilitate it would be very damaging to the children on the site.
In addition, we are gravely concerned about the decision taken by Basildon council this week to remove the Saint Christopher's community centre at Dale Farm. The Centre was provided through Government funding and serves as a place of learning (homework club, IT instruction, photography workshop, youth leadership training for Dale Farm Chaveys Youth Club, and as a chapel for prayer meetings). The supplier of the log cabin structure told the Dale Farm Housing Association and Essex Racial Equality Council that it did not require planning consent. Basildon Council says that it does, and has chosen to issue an Enforcement Order and to vote for a direct action operation for its destruction. This seems to us unnecessarily heavy handed, especially in the light of plans by Professor Stephen Heppell, of NotSchool, to set up a programme at Saint Christopher's to cater for the needs of some fifty children of secondary-school age who have been unable to fit into local schools due to bullying, racial taunts and parental fears over drugs and knives.
We would be grateful if you could look into this matter and would be happy to put you in touch with the Dale Farm Housing Association which is working directly on behalf of the residents.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Solly,
Policy Development Worker.
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