Don’t play to the mob over Gypsies

George Monbiot is correct to call out Priti Patel for playing the race card in the run-up to the election (Journal, 14 November). In April, the House of Commons women and equalities committee concluded its inquiry into the inequalities faced by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. It concluded that “Leadership from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government … has been lacking” and called on the Cabinet Office “to create a specific work stream for eliminating Gypsy and Traveller inequalities”.

Unauthorised camping is a symptom of the lack of a coherent strategy across government, local and national. The Criminal Justice Act 1994 criminalised unauthorised camping and gave the police extensive powers. It didn’t solve the problem, and neither will the proposals in the consultation. In fact, in response to Dominic Raab’s consultation launched in 2018, around powers for dealing with unauthorised Gypsy and Traveller camps, the National Police Chiefs Council and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners rejected calls for a clampdown on unauthorised sites and said “criminalisation of Travellers was not the answer”. It instead called for a “significant increase” in the number of permanent and temporary sites across the country.

The women and equalities inquiry was a serious and thorough effort to improve the situation for the benefit of everyone. This consultation, with its online survey app format and leading questions, is just the opposite.
Lisa Smith
Chair, The Advisory Council for the Education of Romany and other Travellers

• Proposals to criminalise unauthorised Traveller encampments are the kind of rightwing demagoguery we can expect if this government is returned to office. My experience of attending to the welfare needs of these people when I had this responsibility in a south coast city taught me about the hostility they face. Their “crime” is to want to travel and this entails stopping for a few days at a time on spaces that local people don’t wish to share.

The law requires that the welfare needs of particularly the women and children are assessed and met before they are moved on. This upsets some local people a great deal as they regard them as undeserving of such care. Ms Patel’s proposals will, as Monbiot says, fuel this hatred and prejudice.

Twenty years ago legislation required all local authorities to provide permanent Gypsy sites which led many travelling families to give up moving around. Many Conservative local authorities didn’t obey this requirement and got their government to repeal this legislation without any constructive alternative.

With barbed wire and ditches, there are now ever fewer options for Travellers to move around the country and they are forced to use ever less suitable places. Ms Patel wants to stop this by taking away their homes. What then? Lock them up? We should be very afraid that the mob are being given such power.
John Beer
Farnham, Surrey

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