Home About Services Campaigns Advocates Fellows Blogs Resources

A Voice For the Voiceless

The Advocacy Project helps marginalized communities to tell their story, claim their rights and produce social change. We recruit graduate students to volunteer as Peace Fellows with partners.

The Impact of Service "I look at myself as having the potential to be as strong and caring as the amazing women I met in Kenya." Kate Cummings (Tufts University) volunteered in 2009 as a Peace Fellow for Vital Voices in Africa. For more 2009 feedback click here.

Translate this page:

Resources > Global Issues > UK Travellers and... > Dale Farm Documents > Report: Evictions...

Report: Evictions Report of Roma and Irish Travellers

December 2005:

Extract from a draft report to be presented by the UK Delegation to the European Roma and Travellers Forum in Strasbourg in December. The report outlines recent evictions carried out by local councils and hired bailiffs, Constant and Co. on Roma and Traveller sites across the United Kingdom.

Privatized Ethnic-Cleansing: A Practice That Calls For Inquiry

Draft report prepared by the UK Delegation to the European Roma and Travellers Forum

Over the past seven years, while the UK Government has delayed policy decisions affecting the future of Britain’s Travellers, thousands of families have been moved on and evicted by private security and bailiff companies hired temporarily by local authorities.

This privatization of work during evictions, previously done by regular unionized local council staff, has led to:

1) disregard of the Human Rights Act,

2) ignoring of relevant sections of the Race Relations Act and guidance by the Commission for Racial Equality,

3) routine breaching of health and safety regulations, thereby endangering lives, particularly of children, the elderly and the infirm.

The practice of handing over direct action operations of this kind has led to a steep decline in relations between Travellers and local councils, as well as with house-dwelling communities. It has also allowed local authorities to avoid their legal obligations under housing, homeless and even, though to a lesser degree, under education and welfare legislation.

Recent Examples of Bad Practice

Woodside caravan park, a licensed touring sit e owned in part by ERTF delegate Clifford Codona and intended to be developed as a model 50-family Christian community, was vandalized by Constant & Co. on behalf of Mid-Bedfordshire County Council in 2002 and again in 2004. The first eviction operation had to be stopped by Bedfordshire police after children were put in danger.

Video film of the attempted eviction and after math show mothers and children traumatized and the once-attractive wooded surroundings reduced to a demolition site, with broken water piping and exposed electric wiring.

-2-

Bulkington Fields, north of Coventry, was home to approximately 40 families until planning refusal and a demolition order by Nuneaton council. Constant & Co, which boasts being the Gypsy eviction specialists, were hired on at least two occasions, during the second of which in 2004, two teenage girls were assaulted. As at Woodside, violence was used on residents and safety regulations, regarding use of heavy machinery in the presence of children, ignored.

Meadowlands, a relatively small caravan park built on agricultural land at Little Waltham, Essex, was never considered for planning approval by Chelmsford Borough Council, despite repeated submissions. Instead Constant & Co was called in for a direct action operation early in 2003. A mobile home, and at least one smaller caravan, were burned during the clearance. According to evidence at a recent appeal hearing, quantities of property went missing and there are allegations of both looting and arson by Constant employees.

Twin Oaks, at Borehamwood, location of the Elstree film studios, consisted of just twelve small plots and was the subject of repeated planning appeals and negotiations. These were broken off unilaterally by Hertsmere District Council which went instead for the physical force option. The day deliberately chosen was that on which Mrs Ann Egan, a wheelchair invalid, was due to go to hospital. Her chalet was torn down over her head and her two wheelchairs crushed. A pregnant mother was thrown on the ground and an elderly man kicked and beaten.

Hovefields, at Wickford, Essex, has been the target this summer of both evictions operations by Constant and large-scale police raids. Despite a High Court injunction protecting a number of yards pending a judicial review, the property of Mrs Gilheaney, of Ash View, was severely damaged when a bulldozer belonging to H.E.Services, on contract to Constant, drove through her fences and over her land. She has not been compensated.

Dale Farm, a village of some 1,000 inhabitants close to Basildon in Essex, is likely to become the scene of the largest yet single ethnic-cleansing operation by Constant & Co. Basildon District Council has set aside close on £3 million to cover the planned bulldozing of fifty yards at the settlement, and legal costs over three years. A High Court judge has issued an injunction preventing enforcement pending a judicial review.

-3-

In several of the above cases, and others around the UK, the preservation of Greenbelt zones has been cited in refusing planning permission for families to live on their own land. But this must be considered against the urgent accommodation needs of some 4,000 of our families still on the road and facing daily harassment under Section 61 and other anti-Traveller clauses of the punitive Criminal Justice Act of l994.

In addition, it is our case that caravans represent a low-level type of development that fits well with the Greenbelt, extensive areas of which are about to be taken over under large-scale housing schemes being promoted by the Government. In the case of Dale Farm, a big development is soon to start close by on the A127.

The continued harassment of our people, both on and off the road, cannot be justified simply by reference to planning and highway regulations. What is taking place is far uglier than mere land-usage adjustment or anti-trespass policing: Albeit unspoken and unwritten, this is a hard line racist policy, so far condoned by the present Government, to drive Romanies, Gypsies and Travellers that is occurring.

Whether we buy land or continue to take our chances on the road, councils, the police and more recently hired private thugs like Constant & Co., are onto us without let or mercy. Our children are being denied education, or having their schooling frequently disrupted; our sick and elderly cannot get proper medical attention and those of us of working age cannot go about our normal business.

We feel that far from being citizens, we have become victims of the British state. Lip service is paid to our right to follow our traditional way of life. But in practice every official hand is turned against us.

Before presenting this report to the European Roma and Travellers Forum in Strasbourg, we are asking the ODPM to carry out its own investigation in the employment of private companies in eviction work. A glimpse into the much larger picture has been given in the thumbnail sketches above.

It is our considered view that Constant & Co. in particular, which it would be accurate to say has broken the law during every major operation it has undertaken, should be debarred from further employment by local councils for the eviction and clearing of Gypsy caravan sites.

Back