Council response on traveller policy

John Fareham and John Abbott report that the Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Management Committee have approved the Council’s response to the Government’s consultation on traveller policy.

After all the fun and games both we and local residents here have had over the years with sundry unauthorised traveller encampments we thought you might be interested in some of the information contained in the Committee papers. Although we have not been visited by travellers in the last year – in part because of our and the Area Team’s prompt work to move them on, and in part because some of the sites they used to favour have been built on – incursions elsewhere have continued and the Council calculate they spent just over fifty thousand pounds on legal fees and clearing up operations in 2016-17. Less encouraging is the officers’ contention, accepted by the Committee, that they cannot find a suitable location for a stop-off site for travellers  because all the possible locations are places of high flood risk. To take this view is to apply planning criteria for permanent properties to a site used for very temporary stopovers.