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Planning Permission for Caravan Sites Before the enactment of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (CJPOA), local authorities had a statutory duty to provide caravan sites for Gypsies and Travellers under the Caravan Sites Act 1968. However, the CJPOA removed that duty and gave local authorities and the police draconian powers to evict Gypsies and Travellers from unauthorised sites.
The current policy towards Gypsies’ and Travellers’ caravan sites is found in the Circular 1/94 Gypsy Sites and Planning (Circular 1/94), which favours private over public site provision. Gypsies and Travellers should be ‘encouraged’ to purchase land themselves and apply to legitimise their own sites through the planning system.
In theory, requiring Gypsies and Travellers to use the planning system would seem an equitable approach but for this policy to be credible there has to be some real prospect of obtaining planning consent for private sites. The House of Lords cast doubt on the effectiveness of this policy in South Bucks v Porter, Wrexham CBC v Berry, and Chichester DC v Keet and Searle. The judges observed that Gypsies’ and Travellers’ attempts to obtain planning permission almost always met with failure: statistics given to the court found that 90 percent of applications made by Gypsies and Travellers had been refused and that the capacity of sites that had been authorised had fallen far short of what was needed.
Circular 1/94 suggests that local planning authorities should assess the need for Gypsies’ and Travellers’ caravan sites in their administrative areas and identify locations where the land use requirements of Gypsies and Travellers can be met. If suitable locations cannot be found, then the local authority should set clear and realistic criteria for establishing caravan sites. However, the use of development policies has been ineffective in providing more Gypsies’ and Travellers’ caravan sites because very few local authorities have identified suitable locations for such sites and many of those that have adopted criteria-based policies rely upon unrealistic and unclear criteria. For example, some local authorities’ policies exclude the creation of sites in the Green Belt when most of the available land in their area is Green Belt.
Recently, the House of Commons’ Select Committee on the Housing Bill 2004 recommended to the government that only the re-introduction of the statutory duty on local authorities to provide authorised camping sites would remedy the situation.
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