Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I am most grateful to my noble friend. I was saying that it would have a catastrophic effect on the provision of advice and representation to Gypsies and Travellers on issues relating to their accommodation. I am sure that I do not need to remind your Lordships that in the most recent survey by the DCLG in England, almost one in five of the caravan-dwelling population of Travellers was homeless, and that in terms of health, education, life expectancy, employment and access to public services they are the most deprived ethnic minority in our country. The tragic events at Dale Farm in Hertfordshire brought the plight of residents there to the attention of the whole country as their eviction was played out on TV day after day, at an estimated cost to the taxpayer, and to the council tax payers of Basildon, of £18 million. Ministers say that Travellers must obey planning laws like everyone else; but they demolished the system created by the previous Government under which an obligation was imposed on local authorities to provide planning permission for Travellers’ sites that would accommodate the number of Travellers in each area, as determined by an independent assessment of needs, buttressed by public inquiries. Since the Secretary of State gave local authorities carte blanche to rip up those plans and decide in their unaided wisdom whether to allocate any land at all in their development plans to Travellers’ sites, the number of sites for which it was intended that planning permission should be granted has plummeted by half, according to research conducted by the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain. At the same time, because of the unsympathetic attitude to Travellers who want to provide their own accommodation caused by the scrapping of circular 1/2006, Travellers who want to provide their own accommodation now have greater difficulty than ever identifying plots of land on which they would have the remotest chance of getting planning permission. They invariably find that there is an immediate hullabaloo from settled residents in the neighbourhood, whatever the planning merits of the site, because Gypsies and Travellers are the only communities against whom open racist prejudice can still be voiced without challenge. This is the context in which Travellers are to be deprived of legal aid in cases that involve eviction from unauthorised sites and from rented sites; other issues concerning rented sites; High Court and county court planning cases such as injunctions, planning appeals or stop notices; and, finally, homelessness cases. In paragraph 28 of Schedule 1, loss of home is kept within the scope of legal aid, and ““home”” includes a caravan that is the individual's only or main residence. However, the words left out by the first four amendments in this group, and by Amendment 87, would address the exclusion of a caravan that is occupied by a trespasser. This would mean, for example, that a Traveller who trespasses on a local authority site, having been moved on from the roadside to a vacant pitch, would be unable to contest an order for possession and would thus be at immediate risk of losing their home. In such a case recently, solicitors managed to fend off an order and the case is going to trial. A great deal of media attention has been given recently to local authority housing that has been left unoccupied for months, or even years in some cases. If the same is happening on local authority Traveller sites, where the shortage is even more desperate, it is surely desirable that the courts should be able to look into the matter. There is a difference between caravan dwellers and housing trespassers because there are houses in which a homeless person can be accommodated, but there are no sites on which a person dispossessed from a caravan site can find alternative accommodation. There are just no alternative sites available. At the July 2011 count of Traveller sites, there were 4,000 caravans on unauthorised sites in England, of which just over 2,000 were on land not owned by the occupiers and therefore vulnerable to possession orders. When these provisions come into force, almost certainly there will be some landowners who seize the opportunity of kicking the Travellers off, in many cases without even having to turn up in court, and if they do, coming up against an unaided defendant. Since there is nowhere that they can lawfully take their caravans, the evicted Travellers will end up on a different unauthorised site to await yet another eviction. This churning of people living on unauthorised sites will have further harmful repercussions for the lives of the families concerned and, primarily, for the health and education of their children. That will be the effect of removing access to legal aid from people forced to live on unauthorised sites because of the failure of successive Governments over the 50 years of my political lifetime to ensure that Gypsy and Traveller caravan dwellers have places to live. Do your Lordships want to deprive these communities of the right to defend themselves against the threat of repeated eviction? I certainly hope not. Turning to Amendment 77, it is ironic that after the success of the campaign over many years to extend the Mobile Homes Act 1983 to local authority sites, the Government have proposed that all the provisions of that Act, other than the ones concerning possession actions, should be taken out of scope. The Community Law Partnership, to which I pay tribute for the excellent work that it does on behalf of Travellers and for its help in drafting and briefing on these amendments, has lodged an application for judicial review on behalf of a Traveller challenging the failure of the equality impact assessment to address the impact of this proposal on Gypsies and Travellers. For many of them who live on rented sites, there will be no legal advice on breaches of covenant, quiet enjoyment, succession, re-siting of the mobile home, rent increases or repairs. Few of them will have the ability to deal with such cases on their own because of the widespread educational disadvantage that affects these communities and the consequent low levels of literacy and numeracy that they suffer. All we are asking for is for initial advice, since cases other than possession under the Mobile Homes Act in England are dealt with in a residential property tribunal, where legal aid is not normally available anyway. Finally, Amendment 79 restores the right to legal aid in the large number of planning cases that appear not to be covered by paragraph 28(1)(b) because of the use of the term ““eviction””. This could make it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain that for the purpose of claiming legal aid, the loss of home resulting from the dismissal of a challenge under Sections 288 or 289 of the Town and Country Planning Act or the granting of an injunction under Section 187B of that Act may be considered equivalent to an eviction because in any of those cases the occupier forfeits his home in the end, even if there is a delay before he actually has to leave the site. The Community Law Partnership asked the Ministry of Justice for clarification of this point, and in its reply the department stated that, "““legal aid will … remain available to defend an application for an injunction to evict a person from a site under Section 187B of the Town and Country Planning Act or for a planning appeal that might result in the individual being legally required to leave their home””." That appears to cover the whole of Amendment 79, but it needs to be spelled out in the Bill. Annexe B of the Government’s response to the consultation on reform of legal aid contains a list of the key issues raised. One of these was that: "““Funding should be provided for planning appeals and eviction cases involving Gypsies and Travellers because this group was one of the most vulnerable in society””." Immediately following these key issues, in paragraphs 75 to 82, the Government deal with the other issues raised but totally ignore the needs of the Travellers—the usual experience of these communities and the agencies that try to help them. In this case, however, it is not only the Travellers themselves who will suffer if these amendments are not accepted; the greater levels of harassment and evictions of Travellers on unauthorised sites that will inevitably follow the withdrawal of legal aid in planning cases, coupled with the abandonment of a strategy for securing that an adequate number of planning permissions are awarded to meet the needs identified by the Government themselves in their twice-yearly count, means that there will be more unauthorised sites than ever, with the attendant health, education and social problems. Making life more difficult for Gypsies and Travellers is not the way to turn them into good citizens who generate fewer burdens on public services. I beg to move.