MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice.

Basildon Council Rejects Accommodation Site

Dale Farm Bulletin #2
June 21, 2007
For Immediate Release

Contact: Grattan Puxon, Secretary of Dale Farm Housing Association, +44 01206523528

The Development Control and Traffic Management Committee of the Basildon District Council voted last night to reject a residential planning application for the establishment of five pitches at Terminus Drive, Pitsea. The five pitches would have housed six families of the Dale Farm Traveler site who are facing forceful eviction from their homes in early July.

The committee’s vote is another setback for the Travelers living at Dale Farm who are facing eviction. The site at Pitsea was seen as a compromise solution. The designated land is not Greenbelt and would have provided a safe location where both elderly citizens and children with special needs could have been relocated to avoid any potential trauma caused by a future eviction.

Richard Sheridan, President of the Dale Farm Housing Association, expressed the exasperation that many Travelers living at Dale Farm feel by stating, “we have been turned down on Greenbelt. Now they don’t want any of us on Brownfield either.”

The Dale Farm Housing Association still believes that there is strong possibility for the six families to move to Pitsea. An appeal to the British Government of the committee’s decision is being prepared. As Grattan Puxon, Secretary of the Dale Farm Housing Association, stated, the site at Pitsea, “was first suggested by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and it is the same government department which will have the final say. We believe it will be difficult to turn down our appeal.”

The purpose of the planning application was to provide alternative accommodation for six of the neediest families at Dale Farm. The six families, along with five others, currently face eviction from their homes at Dale Farm. The eviction stems from a decision made by the committee on June 5th of this year. Each of the eleven families has until July 6th to leave their property or face direct action from the Basildon District Council to forcefully remove them from their land. Currently, the Dale Farm Housing Association is preparing a judicial review of the committee’s June 5th decision and hopes that it can include the eleven properties in a previous injunction which protects the remaining 45 properties at Dale Farm until a pending judicial review is heard by the High Court later this year.

Dale Farm is the largest Traveler site in Europe. The Travelers at Dale Farm legally own the land on which they reside but have illegally built chalets, moved in caravans and set up a community. Travelers have tried repeatedly to obtain planning permission in order to establish Dale Farm as a legitimate community but have been denied each time. Travelers feel that the rejection of planning permission is racially motivated, while the committee has stated that the restoration of the Greenbelt on which Dale Farm is constructed supersedes granting the Travelers the right to legally build on their land.

• The Dale Farm Bulletin is produced on behalf of the Dale Farm Community Association by Grattan Puxon, Secretary of the Association, and Zach Scott, a 2007 Peace Fellow of The Advocacy Project. For more information, contact Grattan Puxon or Zach Scott. For the Dale Farm chronology and Association news, visit Dale Farm's partner page.

The Advocacy Project
1326 14th Street NW
Washington DC 20005
phone: +1 202-332-3900
fax: +1 202-332-4600