Open letter to Tony Ball, leader of Basildon B.C.
Dear Mr Ball,
You have announced that further action will be taken shortly against families on the Dale Farm estate, especially those now compelled to live in caravans on Oak Lane following your destruction of their homes.
You have ensured that non-one can return to their former homes by ordering the digging up of properties, and the five connecting roads on the estate, and erection of mounds of debris. An act we consider illegal and which calls into question the squandering of £10 million in public money without any solution in sight.
We are told by the Environmental Agency that through these extreme measures you have exposed dangerous levels of toxic waste.
After all this hurt that you have unnecessarily visited upon the community, you now claim to be willing – as you are duty bound to do – to consider the welfare of our families and their children.
A request has been made that to this end everyone should participate in the filling out of a lengthy Questionnaire in order that you should have all the information you require so that the full Council and its officers can consider welfare issues before deciding upon which path of action should be adopted.
You have crippled this community. You have torn down our Community Centre and Chapel and you are now asking us to put together for you information that has largely been in your hands for the past seven or eight years. We have filled in requests for reaccommodation, clearly stating the need for land (not council housing), and we have ensured that information has been available to you on the health of residents, many of whom are suffering serious illness – which has only became worse since the clearance of October 2011.
While you pretend to pay “due attention” to welfare, your every statement and action only underlines your long pursued policy of exclusion. First target were the Romani families and their properties at Hovefields – easier to clear away as fewer in number. Then you came for the Travellers at Dale Farm.
But if you have another face, a face of compassion this is the time to show it. We ask that you:
a) Agree to a meeting at which the question of welfare information be discussed.
b) That the full Council be addressed by Dale Farm representatives.
c) That no one be pressured to leave Oak Lane until secure accommodation (mobile-home parks) are available.
As to fulfilment of the last, we urge as a first step that you award planning permission for the development at Gardiners Lane South submitted by the Irish Traveller Movement as a first step.
Yours sincerely
Grattan Puxon
Secretary
Dale Farm Housing Association
I have long held the post eviction damage to property is probably illegal but I am no lawyer and I read at the time in the Brentwood Gazette (7/10/2011) Mr..Justice Edwards Stuart giving permission to go ahead to evict 49 out of 54 plots with the proviso that this should be done in an orderly manner,plot by plot,not in one fell swoop and that care should be taken to safeguard certain structures like walls,fences and gates about which there were certain legal restraints.
As we know the council got round this difficulty be getting Essex police to force the entry.(this despite the fact that on their website they have two disclaimers that they do not conduct evictions because evictions are civil matters.They only attend as Bystanders ready,if called upon,to intervene in order to maintain the Queen’s peace (Essex Police.uk)
One councillor is quoted somewhere as saying “let us get rid of these people and we can deal with the walls and fences later..”
The Daily Mail ran a feature about all the rubbish gathering on the site and Tony Ball said somewhere that he could not rectify this because he could not enter the property because the Travellers owned it – - which of course they did during and immediately after the invasion by the riot police and still do.
You can make the residents remove unauthorised dwellings but that does not say you can do what you like to the land that they own.