Travellers Law Reform

Greg Yates, the founder of “Clearwater Gypsies” sits on this House of commons committee. Greg is a regular attendees on this committee. As it happens more regular than most of the MP’s apart from the chair person Julia Morgan and Tim Boswell.

The Clearwater Gypsies will lobby to ensure that there are no more “mad” laws made with respect to the Gypsy and Traveller communities.

Clearwater Gypsies use the Community Law Partnership and Garden Court Chambers regularly for their Gypsy site planning case work. This due to their involvement in the highly successful Clearwater case which linked Human Rights legislation to (Gypsy) case law.

The Clearwater Gypsies will provide advice and consultancy to any arm of national or local government in their information gathering phases of any initiative directed towards the Gypsy and Traveller community on the specialised needs of these two ethnic groups.

Romany Gypsies have been in the UK for approximately 500 years, originating from the Indian sub continent. While, thankfully, you can no longer be hanged for just being a Gypsy, there are more laws on the statutes that apply solely and specifically to the Gypsies than any other ethnic group.

Romany Gypsies & Travellers of Irish heritage are 2 ethnic groups that are recognised under the race relations act, as amended. This means that any test that you apply to any other ethnic group also applies to Gypsies, Roma and Travellers.
Example: A headline in a national news paper read “Gypsy HELL”. If you remove the word Gypsy and substitute any other ethnic group such as “BLACK” or “MUSLIM” and this headline would be and is an offence!

Visit Your Rights to see where you stand.

At this moment in time (autumn 2008) there are no plans at any level of government for the potential migration of Gypsies & Travellers coming from the old eastern block countries. Now that the political and physical barriers have come down this is a very real prospect. From our existing work with the South Eastern Regional Assembly (SERA) and local and national government we are aware of a vast lack of provision for the current Gypsy & Traveller community in the plans that are currently being formulated. Should a significant migration occur the existing deficiencies in current and future planning would be greatly exacerbated.