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Nearly Legal blog on DCLG guidance ‘Dealing with illegal and unauthorised encampments’
New blog considers whether, as quoted by DCLG, ‘New Temporary Stop Notices now give councils powers to tackle unauthorised caravans, backed up with potentially unlimited fines’, and says -
‘The tenor and approach of the DCLG release and the stated purpose of the guidance, have unsurprisingly attracted criticism. Travellers groups have highlighted the lack of duty to provide adequate legal sites, but also highlighted that the DCLG’s original press release included the word ‘blight’ in regard to ‘illegal encampments’, a word that vanished between the release of the embargoed version and the final release.
The purpose of this release is presumably summarised in the paragraph quoted above. It is to place pressure on Councils, or more accurately, to put the perceived blame for the ‘problem’ (the ‘blight’) on councils. But the nature of the language, in a situation where the lack of legal sites is acknowledged to be a large-scale problem, in a now familiar manner, is to largely blame the victim for their situation.’