Home Affairs

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 8:41 pm on 29 November 2004.

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Photo of Martin Salter Martin Salter Labour, Reading West 8:41, 29 November 2004

It is a genuine pleasure to follow Mr. Green, with whom I share a dark secret: we are both avid supporters of Reading football club, although I have less distance to travel to see the home games.

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary not only for what he is trying to do to make our communities more secure, to help break the link between drug addiction and crime and to give local councils such as Reading and local police forces new powers to tackle antisocial behaviour or for his efforts to combat serious organised crime. He rightly deserves praise for all those measures and many more besides, but my admiration for him goes far beyond the fine job that I think he is doing as Home Secretary. He is a man of great integrity and unquestionable honesty and commitment. At a time when others are trying to use his personal and private life to bring him down and destroy him, he needs to know that, on the Labour Benches and elsewhere in the country, he has our full, absolute and unflinching support. He has earned that, and he richly deserves it.

I wish to speak in favour of much, but not all, that is in the Queen's Speech, although I fear that, with the general election perhaps only a few months away, many of the measures will not see the light of day without the re-election of a Labour Government for a third term. Although we should take nothing for granted, I believe that that seems an increasingly likely prospect. I have not spoken to a single Conservative Member who believes that Mr. Howard will inherit the keys to No. 10 Downing street, but I have met hundreds of voters who are more than alarmed at the prospect of his inheriting that position.

In this short contribution, I want to deal with three specific issues: Traveller encampments and the problems associated with them; antisocial behaviour and binge drinking; and the link between drugs and crime and the use of drug dealer assets. I have two Travellers' sites in my constituency, and they create different problems. One is at Pangbourne hill and the other is at Portman road. Both involve breaches of the law of the land. At Pangbourne hill, a group of Irish Travellers have legally purchased a plot of land, but have breached every planning law in the book by creating hard standings in an attempt to establish a permanent caravan site in an area of outstanding natural beauty overlooking the Chiltern hills and well outside the settlement boundary as defined in the local plan. It is to be hoped that the new stop notices, which are about to go out to consultation following the introduction of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, will provide a useful measure to enable local authorities to prevent the construction of permanent unauthorised encampments.

On Portman road, the problem is of an entirely different nature and scale. There, on a roadside verge in an industrial estate next to many residential properties, a group of Travellers has created a disgusting rubbish tip around their squatter camp. Local businesses were threatened with violence if they did not offer employment to the Travellers, who had the brass neck to go on to local radio and say that they are claiming income support as a means of subsistence. Local residents have had to endure loud noise, drunken revelling, fighting and Travellers breaking up cars within a few yards of their homes.

Why on earth do we not use the welcome new antisocial behaviour orders to deal with such conduct? Those Travellers' behaviour is every bit as bad as, if not worse than, that of groups of drunken teenagers in my constituency, who have rightly been subject to youth dispersal notices and ASBOs. Merely moving on groups of Travellers from one location to another does precious little to address the two underlying issues—the conduct and behaviour of some Travellers and the lack of suitable sites.