The Supreme Court has told councils they can ban Travellers from their land.
Local authorities have been told they can take out court injunctions to bar Travellers from sites across their boroughs before they arrive. This can be done even if they cannot identify the Travellers in advance of their arrival, five judges have ruled.
It comes after a series of legal battles by local councils to stop Travellers from pitching up on parks, fields, and roadside verges, reports The Telegraph. It is thought there are around 25,000 Traveller caravans in the UK – roughly around a quarter of the Traveller population.
A majority are based on private or local council sites. The supreme court decision backs 38 local authorities – including 16 London boroughs – that had sought to impose “no-go zones” for Travellers.
Councils have previously used injunctions to disperse Travellers by presenting them from moving to sites in the same area. In Harlow, council chiefs banned Travellers from 454 “parcels of land” covering the entire town, while three councils in Hampshire took out an injunction banning unauthorised encampments for five years.
After reviewing the injunctions in May 2021, Mr Justice Nicklin ruled the orders could only apply to people indentified by local authorities. This meant it was almost impossible to ban Travellers who were new to the area.
The ruling was challenged at the Court of Appeal by 12 local councils. It found the court had the power to grant the so-called “newcomer” injunctions.
And, in a ruling on Wednesday, five Supreme Court judges led by Lord Reed, upheld the appeal court’s verdict.
They said: “The court has jurisdiction, in the sense of power, to grant an injunction against ‘newcomers’, that is persons who at the time of the grant of the injunction are neither defendants nor identifiable, and who are described in the order only as persons unknown. The injunction may be granted on an interim or final basis, necessarily on an application without notice.”
Judges however said councils would have to demonstrate a “compelling need” to protect the communities. They could be enforced when other “remedies” such as local byelaws were not sufficient.
The human rights of the “newcomer” Travellers would also have to be protected by authorities, the court ruled. It said Travellers should not suffer “injustice” because of the bans.
Councils, the court says, could do this by issuing public adverts to alert Travellers who could be affected by the bans. This would give them a chance to challenge or hire legal representation to act on the bans.
The judges said they did however have “considerable doubt” it would be justified to impose a ban covering an entire borough, or if it lasts for “significant more than a year”. They said: “It is to be remembered that this is an exceptional remedy, and it must be a proportionate response to the unlawful activity to which it is directed.”
Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley, who sits on the all-party parliamentary group for Gypsies, Travellers and Roma, said: “Unauthorised caravanning should not continue. There’s a difference between one Traveller household finding spare land to rest at, that is a contrast to 20 or 40 or 60 modern vehicles, with modern caravans, taking over public space and making life uncomfortable for regular users.”
Abbie Kirkby, from Friends, Families and Travellers, one of the groups that fought the councils in court, said: “We have been determined to challenge the discriminatory and disproportionate use of these injunctions, used to target Gypsy and Traveller families who have nowhere else to stop. This is just one of the very many prohibitive approaches and eviction powers used to target Travellers and it’s key that the Supreme Court recognises the significance of the lack of site provision and the need for ‘compelling justification’ for such an order to be sought and granted by the Court.”
In one of the cases highlighted in court, bosses in Harlow said it had to move Travellers from illegal campsites on 109 occasions over two years. Meanwhile Bromley council lost a Court of Appeal battle with Travellers to ban from from stopping on public land.
