Dale Farm

[undyingking]

The eviction of the Travellers at Dale Farm is fairly local to me, so it's been on our news pretty much every day for the last however long.

One curious aspect of the coverage, though, is that I don't think I've once heard a TV reporter point out that the land actually belongs to the Travellers themselves: they are being evicted from their own land, which they bought some time before settling it. Whether deliberately or not, the impression has firmly been given that they are squatting/trespassing there – which is quite untrue.

(Was that a surprise to you? If so, that supports my point.)

Given that it's their land, the issue at hand is that they are using it for residential purposes without having planning permission for the change of use. This planning permission would be denied, because the land is in the green belt. But don't think that means it's leafy verdant lungs of the countryside: it was a disused scrapyard when they bought it. It would be hard to argue that using it for residence purposes is any kind of degradation. Planning premission has been granted retrospectively, or the breach tolerated, in any number of such cases – that didn't involve Travellers.

It seems to me that the council are pushing the issue (at considerable expense) not for any practical reason, but because they think kicking Travellers out will play well with the Basildon electorate. And they are probably right.

(Interestingly, if the govt's current plans go through, there will be an enforced predisposition in favour of housing development, even on green belt land. I assume the Travellers could then apply anew for planning permission, and would have to be granted it. That would render this exercise an even more absurd waste of money.)

Comments

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Yep, knew that.

I thought exactly the same thing as you did in your last paragraph.

From reading the parish notice-board in one of the more up-market villages in the vicinty of here, my impression is that all building work is done by doing it then getting retrospective planning permission (to be fair this is for extensions not new houses - though there was one big house burnt down and after years of saying it had to be rebuild they seem to have relented and allowed a bunch of less large but still large houses).

There also seems to be a lot of pretending that brown field sites are green field and vice-versa depending on mood. A big farm equipment shop was built at the edge of town on the pretext that the hockey club had once had a small club-house there.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_alanna/]

I was aware they owned the land and it was a planning permission issue (it was in BBC coverage). I don't have a lot of sympathy with people who try to force permission through as a fait accompli, and I think that having your application rejected is a risk you take when you gamble in that way - sometimes it pays off, and other times it doesn't. I've read about lots of examples where planning offices have rejected retrospective permission and the work has had to be undone, so it's not a particularly unusual situation. I would have thought that the siting on green belt land would make it far less likely that they be given retroactive permission whether they're Travellers or not.

That's not to say that I don't think there was any ulterior motive here (I'm sure there was)... just that I don't have a lot of sympathy for their cause in this instance. OTOH, I do have sympathy with the lack of legal sites for Travellers to use.

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

I only really heard about it this morning on the Today Programme, and they raised the point very prominently that the Travellers owned it but had no planning permission.

I agree with what another commenter said about not liking planning permission done as a fait accompli, but beyond that I have no views on the matter, I don't know enough about the particulars I'm afraid. In general, local government likes coming down hard on travellers for the reasons you cite, but from what I've seen, traveller groups often do themselves no favours in that regard, as they play up to the "us and them" nature of the relationship between themselves and settled residents as much as anyone.