At last, the government is taking steps to ensure that Britain’s Gypsy population gets the permanent, legal sites it needs. So what does this mean for the RSLs that will have to provide them? Eleanor Snow found out.

When Cathy was 12 she was expelled from school for setting fire to her teacher’s hair. She snapped after years of torment from her teacher and fellow pupils for being a Gypsy.

“My teacher picked on all the Gypsy kids,” says Cathy, now 30. “I used to wear these spiked earrings, all of us did – it was part of our culture. But my teacher wasn’t interested and kept telling me to take them out. One day I had enough so I set fire to her hair.” She never went back.

Tensions between travelling communities and house-dwellers – known to Gypsies as “Gaujas” – are perennial. Scare stories about “squalid” camps “blighting” neighbourhoods and harbouring crime and disorder are familiar fodder for tabloid newspapers. The cause of much of this tension is the failure of central and local government to provide legal stopping sites – a failure that forces Gypsies to camp illegally and thus come into conflict with settled neighbourhoods.

But now the government is preparing to act to help the 90,000-120,000 Gypsies and Travellers in England (see “The forgotten minority”, page 24). It is considering two options. The first, and less likely, will restore the statutory duty on councils to provide sites. But it is more probable that the government will instead allocate money to the Housing Corporation, which will pay registered social landlords to build and manage stopping sites. Either option is going to lead to an increase in RSLs working with travelling people. So what can they expect?

Leading where these RSLs will follow is Novas-Ouvertures – it’s been working with travellers for seven years. Novas owns nine permanent Gypsy sites, including Star Lane in Bromley, south London, where Cathy has lived for most of her life.

There are 23 pitches, each with its own amenities block containing a bathroom and kitchen facilities. About 25 adults and 25 children live there at any one time, although it is hard to be precise about numbers because people tend to come and stay for lengthy periods with family members.

They are a close-knit community and proud of their lifestyle. “You couldn’t pay me to live in a house,” says Cathy, who shares a caravan with her 11-year-old daughter, Rachel. “There’s no freedom in a house, no community atmosphere.

“We have all the things that people in houses have. But here you can leave your doors and windows open and your stuff is always safe. Gaujas can’t do that.”

Cathy’s cousin Sharon agrees. She moved to the site 20 years ago and lives with her partner Kenny and their two grandsons, Jimmy, 14, and Tyson, 10, in a large mobile home. Sharon only ever puts curtains up in the winter to help retain warmth; the rest of the year she likes her home to be as open and as visible as possible. She lived in a house until she was 25, but wouldn’t go back. “I don’t like to feel closed in, and that’s what it’s like in a house. I haven’t been well recently but everyone looks out for me here. We’re a real community who choose to live this way.”

John Wilson is Novas-Ouvertures’ assistant director of development for Travellers and has lived down the road from Star Lane for more than 15 years. Although not a Gypsy himself, he has built up a good long-term relationship with the families on the site, something he sees as essential for any

RSL staff working with the travelling community. He is affectionately known as “Cowboy John” thanks to a large stetson hat he used to wear. “The families that live here have long memories,” he laughs, but adds more seriously: “People here have put up with a lot of aggro from the local settled community and they don’t forget that either.”

You couldn’t pay me to live in a house. There’s no freedom, no community atmosphere

Cathy, a star lane resident

Wilson heads a team of 10, including an area manager, housing officers, support workers and a youth worker. The team oversees all nine sites – a total of 120 pitches and about 550 adults and children – visiting them twice a week to make sure people are accessing the outside services they need, such as healthcare and education.

This is important because research by the British Medical Association has shown that in terms of health, the travelling community is the most at-risk group in the UK, with the lowest life expectancy and the highest child mortality rates. Indeed, in the council-owned graveyard opposite Star Lane many of the immaculately kept graves mark the deaths of people younger than 65.

So the support workers at Novas-Ouvertures, who receive extra funds through Supporting People, make it a priority to get people on site to register with doctors and dentists. Often they will go with them to clinics to help them feel at ease in a situation that they are not used to.

Other services are unavailable to Star Lane residents too: the postman, milkman and ice cream van all refuse to enter after being hassled by kids on site. More seriously, education is a big problem, as it is for the whole travelling community.

Education watchdog Ofsted has recognised that many Gypsy and Traveller pupils tend to have low levels of educational achievement and high rates of illiteracy and suffer relentless bullying. It’s part of the support workers’ job to make sure children are going to school – and that they aren’t having a hard time.

“Quite often it’s the parents who don’t want their kids to go to school because they had negative experiences at school themselves, or because they are afraid their children will turn their backs on their background,” says Wilson. To tackle this, on several occasions at Star Lane, the support workers have arranged for parents to go with their kids to school for a few hours a week until they have put their minds at rest.

But providing these services is expensive and takes a lot of staff time. Novas-Ouvertures takes a management fee from the local authorities that own the sites and charges rent to the tenants of about £55 a week, which is mainly paid through housing benefit. “Around nine out of 10 people on our sites are on housing benefit,” says Wilson.

But because it owns the Star Lane site Novas doesn’t get management fees from a council and the site isn’t eligible for ODPM refurbishment grant. So when it comes to maintenance, the RSL must foot the bill.

This makes it extremely difficult to keep the place up to scratch. “I’m not proud of this site,” Wilson says. “There’s a lot that needs doing to it that we just can’t afford. There’s only one small access road, the surrounding undergrowth needs trimming, proper fences need to be installed, the amenities blocks need new drains.

“It’s difficult trying to renovate an old site like this because it wasn’t built to cater for so many homes. So, at the moment, things look run down and there is a lot of rubbish being dumped here as a result. Rubbish tends to breed rubbish.”

We don’t have enough staff. We really need at least one member of staff on site every day

‘Cowboy’ John Wilson, Novas-Ouvertures

Re-letting empty pitches can also be a problem if people not known by those already living on site want to move in. When Wilson re-let an empty pitch at Star Lane last year to a new couple, they didn’t last more than a few months. Unaffectionately dubbed “Posh and Becks” by Cathy and Sharon, it was felt that they were “stuck up” and unwilling to become part of the community.

“What made the situation worse,” says Wilson, “is that we don’t have enough staff. We really need at least one member of staff on site every day to defuse tension like that created by the newcomers.”

There are other challenges for Wilson, too: when a man from the site was sent to prison last year, the community made it clear that they didn’t want anyone else to move onto the pitch. If it had been a family living there it would have been possible to transfer the letting name to a wife or partner, but the man was single so it has now been lying empty for several months – Novas has been unable to re-let because of threats to burn down any other caravan that is put on the pitch.

Money troubles

During an ODPM select committee review of the government’s Gypsy and Traveller policy in July this year, the Local Government Association decided a statutory duty was needed but said funding was just as important. “Unless there is a statutory duty supported by adequate funding it is unlikely that site provision and wider service provision for travelling communities will be developed as a priority for both financial and practical reasons,” an LGA spokesperson said.

The select committee review is due to report in the autumn, and is remaining tight-lipped about what it will say. Housing and planning minister Keith Hill has also refused to comment, but has told the review he is concerned about the “significant spending implications” of a statutory duty and said he did not want to put travelling people in an “advantageous” position over local residents without housing needs.

Wilson also favours a statutory duty and believes it would be a bad move for the government to allocate money through the corporation. First, he says, it would release local authorities of their responsibility to cater for the travelling community. Second, it has not been made clear where the money will come from, and Wilson fears it might take away funding from housing developments.

Neither Cathy nor Sharon is particularly interested in what the government will decide for the wider travelling community. Their concerns are centred on having a decent site for themselves, where their presence doesn’t cause tension with local people.

Thanks to Novas-Ouvertures, things are indeed looking up for Rachel, Cathy’s daughter. Unlike her mother, she has had positive experiences at school and is looking forward to starting secondary school next week with her best friend, who is from a on-travelling family. But she is like her mum in one, fundamental way. “I’ll always live in a caravan,” she promises. And with the help of RSLs and councils, she should be able to.

The forgotten minority

According to the Gypsy and Traveller Law Reform Coalition, a group of organisations that represent Gypsies and Travellers, there are 90,000-120,000 nomadic people in the UK, with a further 200,000 people from these groups living in housing – in total, that’s about the same as the population of Leicester, although the exact figure is difficult to estimate as census records are not accurate.

Government research into the provision and condition of local authority Gypsy and Traveller sites in England, published in 2002, estimates that an additional 1000-2000 pitches on local authority sites are needed to address the current shortfall, and that the maintenance and improvement expenditure needed to bring existing sites up to the required standard and maintain them at this level over the next 30 years is £123.5m.