In startling figures revealed by a Government department, the number of people living full time in caravans in the UK has soared. These are not for the main part holidaymakers, but gypsies and travellers living on official and unofficial sites across the length and breadth of the country.
Figures from the Government’s official records for gypsy and traveller population index shows, that in 1997 the number of travellers living on sites in Britain was just short of 13,000. At the beginning of 2010 the number of people living full time in caravans had risen to over 18,000. An increase of approximately 400 caravan dwellers a year.
Many reasons are being put forward for the explosion of people choosing an alternative lifestyle but there is no doubt that both official and unofficial sites are causing rifts and tensions between the traveller communities and local residents in the areas around them.
Local residents say that in some areas, the imbalance of travellers to the incumbent population is having a detrimental effect on the area, while the travellers themselves claim they are often vilified without reason.
Lawyers are putting the Human Rights Act of 2000 as one cause for the rise in numbers of illegal sites. It is now more difficult legally and more expensive financially to evict people from land in general. The Government report also noted that travellers are buying land and putting caravans on site without planning permission. This has seen the caravan population almost treble on sites such as these, from around 800 in 1997 to 2,300 present days, and it infuriates nearby residents, who see the traveller’s tactics as an underhand way of eventually getting planning permission for land that they have bought for a pittance.
Pressure groups representing the travellers explain away the rise in population as nothing more than natural family growth. Gypsies are known to have bigger families in general than normal families.
There is no doubt that part of the growth in caravan dwellers is down to families feeling the pressure of urban life and the expensive lifestyle that goes with it. More, it seems, are deciding to sell up, buy a caravan and the caravan insurance to go with it and set off for pastures new. The freedom experience of life touring in a caravan or motor home is attracting more and more people all the time and who can blame then.
