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Ian Shires
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Government childcare announcement: More Conservative chaos hurting families
The case for a radical, liberal left
Blue light bill bombshell as emergency services face £144m fuel and insurance costs
Travelers – The continuing saga of unauthorised encampments
by Ian Shires on 27 July, 2017
It’s now Thursday morning and the travelers are still on Bentley Haye in Rough Wood Chase Local Nature Reserve Willenhall winner of the much coveted Green Flag award.
They broke onto the site of natural beauty late on Friday afternoon last week. We informed the Council’s Community Protection Team having been tipped off by local residents. The process of getting them off the site began in earnest.
It’s a process which the travelers are well versed in and they know that if offers don’t strictly adhere to it the length of their stay is lengthened. As it stands, all the steps had been completed by early yesterday (Wednesday) and a summons was issued.
If the travelers have not left the site, and they hadn’t when I checked earlier today, Walsall Council has a slot booked in at the Walsall’s Magistrate’s Court for an order to evict them.
The Lib Dem Focus Team in Willenhall has asked for an urgent clean up of this popular nature reserve site and for it to be secured to prevent any further unauthorised encampments.
“All this takes up many hours of officer time and the costs of the incursions so far this year is mounting up into the hundreds of thousands of pounds” said Lib Dem Cllr Ian Shires. “I have asked for a review of how Walsall Council deals with this problem as even when officers get sufficient evidence together in order to comply with the onerous requirements within government legislation to get injunctions on worst affected sites al that is achieved is moving the problem around.
“The view that the Coalition administration is coming to is that we need to take the drastic action of identifying one site in the borough as a transit site. By doing this any unauthorised encampments could be dealt with without the need to go through the current process which generally takes between four to five days”.
In council areas where this has been done the number of unauthorised encampments has been reduced to the low single figures.
4 Comments
I would have thought if they had broken on to it, it could be dealt with by the Police .
Logic says that should be the case but they have to be observed actually making the break in and those witnessing it have to be prepared to make a statement which may be used in court which makes the current legislation around travellers out of touch with reality. The Westminster Government needs to review current legislation. The Council is reviewing it’s powers but to improve the response time in getting them off unauthorised sites would require a permanent transition site being identified somewhere in the borough. Therein lies the rub. Where to put that site and lets not start speculating as no site has been identified.
So you sort a site out for them. Do they pay council tax rates on that. If not I will sell up and get me a plot
We are working on trying to find a solution to this issue, something that previous administrations have failed to do. The first step is to try to identify a site which will not be easy. Whilst we are doing this officers will be looking at the current legislation in detail to establish exactly who does what. Who pays and what for etc. As far as we are concerned the present situation is not working and is costing a great deal of money which can ill be afforded so doing nothing is not an option. The council has to act within the law as prescribed by central government over which we have no control. That rests with MPs.