Question 12: To what extent do you agree with the proposed monitoring and review indicators? Please provide comments to support your answer.
Prove monitor
Slightly disagree. The issue is that regardless of what MBC agrees to monitor and review sites; they are rarely carried out. We already have a substantial array of policies and guidelines, but these are ignored, or cherry picked to as suits the situation. Complaints by the settled community, law breaking, intimidation and abuse is ignored, and this has created a huge amount of tension between the G&T and settled community. Enforcement is non-existent, and when it does happen it is too little, too late, as typically MBC eventually agrees the site. Sadly, this has led to a one law for G&Ts and one for the settled community.
Q12 – Monitoring Indicators Additional Comment • Include KPIs for health, education, community integration, crime, fly-tipping, and unauthorised occupation. • Monitor whether caravans are used by non-Gypsies/Travellers to ensure compliance and policy effectiveness.
Headcorn Parish Council is broadly comfortable with the proposed monitoring and review indicators, but considers that additional indicators are needed. A. Headcorn Parish Council considers that indicator GT-6 needs to be supplemented with an additional indicator on the number of unauthorised developments. It is unauthorised developments, rather than encampments, that are of primary concern within Headcorn Parish. B. Headcorn Parish Council considers that until planning policy is backed by robust enforcement action, there will be no incentives for gypsy and travellers to abide by planning policy rules, leading to continued unauthorised development. Tracking enforcement is therefore needed in order to give visibility to this important tool of 11 planning policy and to deliver on the plans objectives. Therefore the monitoring and review indicators should be revised to include: i) the number of cases referred to enforcement; and ii) the number of successful enforcement actions. C. In addition, Headcorn Parish Council considers that, in order to assess need more effectively, Maidstone Borough Council should also collect information on: overcrowding versus concealed households; affordability; the geographic distribution of gypsy and traveller pitches in the Borough and indicators of where these are disproportionate compared to the settled community; time taken for applications to be processed; and windfall developments.
We basically agree, but MBC needs to expand its Enforcement Team, and if there are any breaches of the allocation agreements resulting in appeals, then MBC should be prepared to robustly evict and have a budget to cover judicial reviews if Inspectorate Appeal decisions go against MBC. We think the monitoring of traveller children's education needs should be added. So many traveller children leave school after primary school. As MBC is finding accommodation for G&Ts, we think MBC has a duty to protect the children's legal rights. It is a legal responsibility of local authorities to monitor and oversee home working until school leaving age. This is a KCC responsibility, but we think MBC should monitor KCC’s actions in fulfilling their legal responsibility to the traveller children. Unless there is legislation, it is illegal to allow traveller children not to go to school, and not to monitor home working to school standards. CONCLUSION Finally, we would plead for Ulcombe's situation to be regarded as a special case in the planning and allocation of future G&T pitch provision. Given our position at the top of the list of existing G & T sites by percentage of population, not just in Maidstone, but also in the wider context of Kent and the UK, we feel we have made more than a generous contribution to the accommodation of G&T families. The fact that these families live in a parish like ours with no services makes it all the more obvious that any future expansion would be unsustainable. We therefore believe that Ulcombe cannot take any more G&T pitches and fervently hope that MBC will take this on board.