After ten years of legal wrangling, there are just ten days left until Basildon District Council can forcibly clear one of the largest unauthorised traveller sites in Europe.
Half the community at Dale Farm in Essex have been told they’re living there illegally because they don’t have planning permission.
They say they’ve got nowhere else to go – and are refusing to leave. The council expect the cost of policing the eviction could be more than £18million.
Soon after the end of August Basildon Council’s bailiffs will move in for what has been called the biggest single eviction in peacetime Britain.
The folk who live at the farm are Irish travellers. Around eighty of their caravans are set to be forcibly cleared off the site. Around 400 people at Dale Farm don’t know how much longer they’ll keep their homes.
But the people who live on this site aren’t squatters. They own the land here, the problem the council has with them is that they don’t have planning permission to live on it.
Of course, the travellers here say that’s because the council won’t give them planning permission.
There may be a certain irony about a group of travellers who are refusing to budge. But many now appreciate the benefits of a settled life.
Six-year-old Jimmy-Tom Sheridan goes to school and is learning to read, which is progress for the family. His mum Nora didn’t go to school and can’t read.
Some have been offered council housing but the travellers don’t want their community broken up and many don’t want to live in houses anyway. That’s always been hard for settled communities to understand.
The Conservative led council insist this is about protecting the greenbelt. But the travellers can’t understand why land that was a scrap yard before they bought it can’t now be their home.
They say they’ll move to another site if one can be found but so far the council has not given planning permission on the alternative sites that have been offered.