Olivia Blake

That is why I think it is important that local authorities work with the community to understand their needs. There are many reasons why individual families may not feel able to be on a site. They may also want to create their own space and home, which I completely understand. Rather than creating more sites, the previous Government moved to criminalise GRT communities through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Those laws should be repealed, in my view. We should be tackling the root cause of the issue: the failure of the system to support a diverse group of people who already suffer prejudice and discrimination. There is a lack of understanding about the realities for this group. It is not just that we need new sites and more pitches; the ones that we have are not up to scratch. That is certainly true of the sites in my constituency: they are often segregated from settled communities and suffer problems with access to services, transport and schools. There is no path to reach the community that I represent, so children have to walk down a 60 mph road to get the bus to school. When the street lights were updated, for some reason the contractor did not realise that the council owned the properties, so the community has been living with poor-quality street lighting rather than LEDs. I hope that that will soon be resolved on the site. That is the kind of suffering that we see in those communities. They are often seen as other, as different or as difficult to deal with. That is not true, in my experience. If we listen to the concerns of the community, we will see progress and clarity of responsibility, not only from the community itself but from the services that are meant to serve it. Decisions are often made to place sites in unsafe areas next to main roads, refuse destructors, traffic-laden areas, intersections of motorways, busy highways or railway tracks. There are many reasons that people would not want their children to be near those things. That has contributed significantly to the health, education and other social inequalities that we see in the community. We have to acknowledge that the isolation and segregation are partly due to political pressure. We know that local authorities have not achieved what they should in terms of sites, options and working with the community as best they can. That is why this is not just a technical debate on planning laws; we have to talk about tackling attitudes as well. When the Caravan Sites Act 1968 gave councils a statutory duty to create sites, many people opposed having them in their area. To put it bluntly, the location of many sites today is a consequence of anti-Traveller racism. The site in my area is right on the edge of town, away from many services. We need more sites and pitches, and we need to end the criminalisation of people living in a legitimate way, but we also need to work with the community and listen to their needs, understanding that they are individuals and have individual rights, as we all do. The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton probably disagrees; he alluded to European human rights putting one group ahead of another. I disagree. I think that those rights protect us all and allow us all to have the individual rights and freedoms that we so richly deserve.