Sito per viaggiatori di quattro acri “costruito illegalmente nel fine settimana”

Maybe we should get the travellers to help with the housing crisis.

The site owner can tell the council they will be applying for retroactive planning permission.

Wait 6 months before submitting something.

The council will reject the application after a few months.

Then the site owners can wait 6 months before they appeal the decision with the planning inspectorate.

The planning inspectorate has a 4 month backlog.

The site owner can stall this out for about 18 months if they wanted to.

I know we have rules and most people don’t want to live near travellers, but a small part of me is thinking “fair play to them”. They got the gumption to get things done, it seems. 

There’s a plot at the end of our lane where a traveller family are doing what can only be described as “permission creep”.

Buy empty field – put horses in it (and neglect them to the point where all the people living on the lane end up feeding them)

Ask for permission for a stables with water and power supply – granted

Ask for permission for a “hard standing” next to stables

Ask for permission for a septic tank adjacent to the hard standing – NB the horses are long gone

Ask for permission for a “temporary mobile home installation on said hard standing” – we are here and have been for 18 months. Been denied twice so far.

A traveller group cut the locks to our local park and moved in over the weekend. All timed to coincide with the Bank Holiday weekend when they figured the council offices would be closed.

These people are experts at gaming the system – they know the by-laws better than the local council officers, or the police.

They also rely on threats and intimidation to create a firewall around themselves – even the police are terrified of them as they’re usually outnumbered 5 to 1.

If any regular citizen committed the civil and criminal offences they do, we’d be in serious trouble – but the rules are different for travellers seemingly. It’s such an odd anachronism in the 21st century to have mobile criminal gangs moving throughout the country operating almost with impunity!

Anyway, the park is already wrecked – buildings broken into and scuttled, sports pitches torn up, human extrement in the bushes. Anything not nailed down in our front gardens was lifted on the first night.

If there are Traveller groups that wish to settle down as in this story I’m entirely sympathetic but they’ll just have to go through the normal processes like the rest of us – and then start paying some council tax!

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