Dale farm apply to English Heritage for listing

[robgil]

Do they own houses in Ireland?
Perhaps we should just stamp out any community who wishes to lead an alternative life style, such as travellers, green home builders, people on benefits, people who make a mess, why stop there , why not make every body dress the same as well. :lol:

When you look at the facts, there is already a site there, they own the land , a few caravans are pretty much as temporary a building as you can get.
But the local ''we pay council tax blah blah blah'' just dont want them there and care less about where they go.

So , how can you pay council tax on a caravan? And how do these people know they dont pay tax on earnings?

I am not for or against the travellers staying there, I do believe in fairness though.

Has anybody actually asked them to tidy up after them selves? :lol:

 

[skier-hughes]

But they have no where else to go.

Maybe because up here in Staffordshire two gypsy families have converted the travelling pitches into mobile home parks, losing some 20+ pitches, and these mobile homes have been sold off to non-travellers, who pay more money for them.

One of the famillies has since tarmacced a green field next to their mobile home park and put several travellers on it. They were removed. Retrospective planning permission was requested, as there were not enough travellers pitches. Fortunately the local council used their request to convert the previous pitches to mobile homes due to no take up on travellers pitches to refuse their need for them now.

So, just like our MP's, the Scottish environmental people alledgedly and most big businesses they are greedy.

I'm for removing the illegally pitched travellers.

 

[robgil]

The only way they could convert the pitches is if they owned them , which is fair enough.
My point is if the council wants to evict family's off their own land the least they could do is provide them with somewhere else to go.
Once those vans leave the park, as soon as they pull over to the side of the road they are technically breaking the law. So , not only are the council making men , women , children and elderly people homeless , they are potentially turning them into criminals.
The sad fact is these travellers wont just disappear, they will pitch up somewhere else.
Problem solved? Not really.

 

[Pford75]

I don't think it's a question of eviction...as you say, they own the land. But all buildings require planning permission...if I want to build a home in my garden, I am expected to apply for planning permission...if I do not, then the local council will force me to demolish it or do it for me. These people have not applied for PP and so are now breaking the law. Why should they be treated differently?

If I declare that my 'alternative lifestyle' demands that I ignore LBC, should I be allowed to ignore my CO and do what I want to a Listed Building?

Suggesting that asking someone to obey the law with respect to planning is the same as 'making them wear the same clothes' is childish. I don't begrudge them their lifestyle, but if there is no respect for the law then we have chaos. If they feel free to ignore the law, why should their neighbors not do so as well? I'm sure you'd be up in arms if a developer just built some Barratt boxes on the green belt, so why is this any different?

 

[robgil]

I would say planning permission would have been met with fierce opposition from the local community anyway and thus may not have seemed like a worth while venture? After all permission was granted once before so applying a second time wouldn't have been so difficult, why not grant it? It would solve all this trouble?
It's simple , they don't want them there, it's not about them breaking the law.
Each planning application should be looked at as an individual application , there for if it was granted and they could stay there no one could moan ''well they got it, why cant I''.
I would imagine granting them planning permission would not make things any worse than they are now.
Making them homeless, women and kids and old people is unacceptable, no matter how many of the locals moan about them being there.

 

[Flyfisher]

The mere fact that this whole debacle has been going on for a decade or more just shows what a right old mess it all is.

But how about this little 'you-couldn't-make-it-up' gem: funding and building a community centre on the site without any planning permission - who could possibly do such a thing? Er, hang on a minute, it's the county council. :shock:
http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/2237557.taxpayers_fund_12_000_community_centre_at_dale_farm/

 

[robgil]

Taxpayers fund travellers' community centre

Thats some pathetic headline from the start , of course tax payers funded it , as they do most if not all community centres. My council tax is funding a community centre 10 miles away in a surrounding town, but no one writes headlines about that.
And what better a place for a community centre than within the community it was intended for? Isnt that what a community centre is?
If the council dont need PP then neither do the travellers. :lol:

 

[Flyfisher]

My council tax is funding a community centre 10 miles away in a surrounding town, but no one writes headlines about that.

Possibly because it has full planning permission and is therefore not newsworthy?

If the council dont need PP then neither do the travellers. :lol:

Yes, that was my point. Hence the right old mess.

 

[biffvernon]

They've broken the law.

I'm not sure that that in itself is a strong argument. Bad laws, such as those that discriminated on grounds of sex, get tend to get changed after people break them. Good laws, such as speed limits on roads, get broken by almost all motorists.


Caravans: http://g.co/maps/tte4u

 

[LadyArowana]

Much has been made about the rights of these people to an alternative lifestyle, but what of the rights of others in the same community to a more orthodox lifestyle. Presumably many moved into their dwellings when the farm was agricultural land and had an expectation it would be protected from development. Whether that development is in the form of a group pitching mobile homes or a developer building high density boxes for profit or a Premier League footballer wanting a 20,000 square ft neo-georgian mansion with attached multi car garage.

Interesting that the planners are seen by some as the bad guys for denying permission for Dale Farm to become a permanent mobile home encampment but would no doubt be praised for denying a "rich banker" permission for a huge McMansion in the same place. The core of the argument seems essentially the same. That land ownership does not convey an absolute right to build exactly what you want on it and that the planning laws have evolved as a means to manage this.

 

[skier-hughes]

The only way they could convert the pitches is if they owned them , which is fair enough.

True, but then why moan that there aren't any travellers pitches to go to, when travellers are converting the ones they already have to non travellers pitches, you could argue that other travellers have made the Dale Farm travellers homeless, because they themselves have removed the pitches they could have used!

 

[worms]

The mere fact that this whole debacle has been going on for a decade or more just shows what a right old mess it all is.

But how about this little 'you-couldn't-make-it-up' gem: funding and building a community centre on the site without any planning permission - who could possibly do such a thing? Er, hang on a minute, it's the county council. :shock:
http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/2237557.taxpayers_fund_12_000_community_centre_at_dale_farm/

My reading of the article suggests that the Essex County Council youth fund granted generic funding to another organisation (the Essex Racial Equalities Council) who granted funding to the travellers towards the cost of a community centre, which the travellers then built without planning consent.

So not quite

If the council dont need PP then neither do the travellers.

 

[Penners]

They've broken the law.

I'm not sure that that in itself is a strong argument. Bad laws, such as those that discriminated on grounds of sex, get tend to get changed after people break them. Good laws, such as speed limits on roads, get broken by almost all motorists.

That's as spurious an argument as I've heard in a very long time. The reasons why laws get changed, and the extent to which people break laws, are irrelevant. The law hasn't been changed, so these people are breaking it.

If the law that these people have broken was bad, then by your argument, it would have been changed. God knows it's been broken often enough.

If motorists are caught breaking the speed limit, they get prosecuted. It's the law in action.

 

[Flyfisher]

Indeed. I'm sure we all have our own idiosyncratic views on which laws are good and which are bad, but as long as a law exists then surely it should be applied equally to all? Campaign to have laws changed, by all means, but openly flouting them is the road to anarchy . . . which might see the local residents hiring their own bulldozers and dealing with things as they see fit.

 

[Moo]

I seem to remember a local resident, this week on telly, stating that if the 'travellers' get their way she intends to go ahead with a whopping great extension to her house,regardless of planning permission.
Once a precedent is set......

 

[biffvernon]

Presumably many moved into their dwellings when the farm was agricultural land and had an expectation it would be protected from development.

False presumption. The land was a council owned scrapyard piled high with broken cars!

 

[Flyfisher]

. . . or perhaps not.

The disputed section is a "former scrapyard on seven acres of greenbelt land"[3] of which, Basildon council say: "The use of a small parcel of land in the north-east corner of Dale Farm as a scrap yard was established without planning permission in the early 1960's. According to its previous owner, the site "was originally concreted over by Basildon council." Basildon council deny this, although a contractor who worked for the previous owner said, "Basildon council regularly brought waste tarmac and rubble from roadworks and dumped it on Dale Farm for a period of 10 years until the 1990s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Farm

As I said earlier, a right old mess.

 

[Flyfisher]

My reading of the article suggests that the Essex County Council youth fund granted generic funding to another organisation (the Essex Racial Equalities Council) who granted funding to the travellers towards the cost of a community centre, which the travellers then built without planning consent.

Another 'organisation' perhaps, but all part of the council. Anyway, what sort of council hands over money to build anything before the appropriate planning permission has been granted?

In 2008, Essex County Council's Racial Equality Council funded a £12,000 community centre built at the site, built without planning permission.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Farm

 

[worms]

You are absolutely correct: public funding normally has to have the planning permission in place prior to an award being made and this should have happened.

The relationship between the ECC and EREC isn't clear - it seems to have been a free-standing charity and company limited by guarantee between formation in 1998 and its demise in 2011, but whether ECC was pulling the strings or not I can't find. For contentious issues such as this, I would want to triangulate any info I got from Wikipedia before being certain it was correct!

 

[Penners]

I would want to triangulate any info I got from Wikipedia before being certain it was correct!

I believe that the closer you get to the North Pole, the less reliable triangulation becomes anyway. :wink: