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The roundabout at the top of the motorway slip road has a new exit. A wide gateway opens up into a grassy field. Four or five caravans are parked and someone has hand written a sign advertising Springer spaniel puppies. It’s high summer (or what passes for it in this rain sodden year) in Worcestershire and the traveller community is on the move.

Across most of my diocese gypsies and travellers are the largest minority ethnic group. They’ve been here for centuries, an essential part of the seasonal work force in both rural and market town areas; and yet prejudice against them is fairly described as the last socially acceptable form of racism in Britain. It’s a racism that turns the task of providing accommodation and services into a minefield. And for a dozen years, from 1994 to 2006, it was a racism strengthened by the indifference of central government.

For the last year there’s been more hope. Local authorities are now meant to be working towards an adequate provision of sites. But there’s a notable lack of haste in how councils are responding. Few want to show their hands before their neighbours do for fear letting others off the hook. It’s likely to five or ten years before there is adequate accommodation for today’s travellers, and it’s a safe bet that the natural growth from a culture of early marriages and large families will outstrip the additional provision.

In the meantime we need plans that will deliver short term accommodation for the 10,000 or so travellers in excess of the available sites. At the least we need to use the planning system to gain temporary permission for a good number of the sites that the gypsy community have bought and developed without authorisation. Making permission temporary will not entirely silence the complaints of other landowners who cry “foul” when travellers are allowed to build but their own applications for executive residences are turned down, but it will mitigate them. Temporary permission will allow an appropriate level of investment in infrastructure and services so that sites remain tidy and well-managed. Temporary permission will create a presumption of extension until permanent solutions are found – and that can only help concentrate minds. I also hope that the larger institutional landowners, many of whom have policies on rural diversification, will work with their tenant farmers to see how provision of sites for travellers can generate a small but worthwhile income stream. It would be good to see those Housing Associations who have travellers in their stock taking a lead.

In all this I’ve been encouraged by the efforts of one local council in Worcestershire where elected members have made serious efforts to educate themselves about both the gypsy community and their own role in providing travellers with adequate and accessible public services. If it can work here it can work across the country and we can reach the point where racist attitudes towards gypsies and travellers are as unacceptable as other forms of racism.