By Cllr Jason Brock
Regular readers of this paper will be all too familiar with the column inches given over to stories of illegal traveller encampments in the town.
They will also be aware of the inconvenience that illegal encampments can have on local communities.
Last year, there was not one day without an illegal encampment in Reading – mostly located on Council land. Enforcement and clean-up bills have cost the Council an estimated £400,000 over the previous five financial years.
The Council last week went some way towards trying to mitigate those impacts when members of the Planning Applications Committee approved plans for a dedicated transit site for travellers in Reading. It was the culmination of a lengthy process that began many years ago, and long before I joined the Council.
We are, understandably, often asked as a Council why we can’t immediately evict an illegal encampment when it pitches up on Council land.
Well, put simply, the necessary legal process is is not as simple and as quick as we would like. Council officers will try to visit an unauthorised encampment within one working day of it arriving to carry out checks and an assessment.
Our next step is then to swiftly submit an application to either the County Court or Magistrates’ Court for a court hearing to repossess the land.
After that point, the timings are taken totally out of the Council’s hands, and we must wait on the courts on a hearing date.
That can take up to 10 weeks due to a backlog of cases, and no doubt a lack of resources in the court system. It’s a process that can only be sped up by Government legislating to alter the system (or, perhaps, by choosing to resource the court system more adequately).
Occasionally, the other thing that can happen is that Thames Valley Police elect to use what is known as a ‘Section 61 notice’ to move an encampment on where they decide it reaches a threshold of causing damage, disruption or distress.
Under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, the Police also have powers to seize the vehicles of those who have failed to comply with a direction to leave land, but only if a suitable transit pitch is available within a local authority area. Because there is currently no dedicated facility in Reading, the ability of Thames Valley Police to make full use of these powers is, of course, limited. The construction of a dedicated transit site could now reverse that position.
National guidance means every local planning authority should seek to provide sites on which the Gypsy and Traveller community can live, but choosing a suitable site was a far from straightforward task and, as I say, was many years in the making.
Reading, unlike some of our wealthier and leafier neighbours, is not blessed with an abundance of open space.
Once an assessment, carried out on our behalf by Hampshire County Council, established a substantial unmet need for a traveller site here, the Council evaluated 80 possible sites and then went through the painstaking process of whittling them down.
It won’t surprise you that, in a tightly knit and densely populated town, the majority of these potential locations proved to be completely unsuitable. Indeed, only two were found to be viable.
A site at the junction of Cow Lane and Richfield Avenue was initially chosen, but this had to be abandoned when it was selected as the site for a desperately needed new secondary school for Reading, the River Academy.
The site at Smallmead was therefore pursued, on a strip of land near to the Household Recycling Centre. Nobody is pretending it is the ideal site, but that’s because an ideal site doesn’t exist in Reading.
The site will accommodate seven pitches, or up to 14 caravans. It is intended for temporary periods, ranging from a few days up to a maximum permitted stay of three months at a time. Pitches will include connection for electricity and a serviced sanitary block, while the site will also feature a play area and secure fencing.
The Council will hire a Gypsy and Traveller Liaison Officer to manage the site on a day-to-day basis. As colleagues on the planning committee acknowledged, the operation of the site will be an important factor here, and I’m pleased they have asked for the detail of that operation (in the form of pre-commencement planning conditions) to return to them for review before works will be permitted to start. Detailed scrutiny is always to be welcomed in cases like this.
In the longer term, it is also important to note that the needs assessment carried out in Reading further identified the need for a permanent traveller site in the area in addition to the transit site which is now progressing.
As a Council, we intend to continue discussing possible options for a permanent site with neighbouring authorities to address this future need.
Given the shortage of land supply in the town, the collaboration of our neighbours is necessary if we are to provide a facility that, rightly, should be available in our part of Berkshire.
Cllr Jason Brock is the leader of Reading Borough Council and Labour member for Southcote ward
