 Good morning and welcome to this 15th meeting of the Quality and Human Rights Committee. I make the usual request that mobile phones are switched on to airplane mode, are switched off-place. We have not received any apologies for the meeting this morning and Annie Wells will be joining us imminently. Agenda item 1 this morning is to take agenda item 3 in private committee content to do that. Yes. Agenda item 2 is our continuation of our inquiry on school bullying and some of the other aspects of issues affecting gypsy travellers in Scotland. That will be our main focus of our business today. With us this morning, can I welcome back to committee Chris Oswald. Chris is from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Welcome back. Michelle Lloyd, who is a project manager from Meacop. Welcome, Michelle. Thank you for coming along. Maureen Finne, who is the director of STEP, which is the Centre for Mobile Cultures and Education. Maureen, we are really grateful for you being here this morning, because I think we are very interested in the work that you are doing. We are very interested in the work that everyone is doing this morning. This is a bit of a scoping session on gypsy travellers. It is a follow-up from the work that the previous Equalities and Human Rights Committee had conducted. A look into some of the aspects of their current inquiry on school bullying. A few topics to cover there this morning, but I am sure that we can get through them all this morning. We are very keen to hear from you. Chris, I know that you have got something specific to say on the planning act. What I was going to do was give you all a couple of minutes each to tell us a wee bit about your interest in these aspects of the work. Maybe you can address the planning issue in your opening remarks. Chris, do that for everyone and then we can come in with questions. Are you comfortable with that? Excellent. Chris, if I can start with you. Thank you very much for inviting us again to talk about gypsy travellers again in front of the Quality and Human Rights Committee. As I am sure the committee will be aware, the Quality and Human Rights Commission is a GB regulator for equality and deals with the reserved issues of human rights in Scotland, sharing our remit on human rights with the Scottish Human Rights Commission. Over the years, we have been very supportive of the committee's inquiries. There have been a number of very pertinent recommendations that have been made. Unfortunately, I think over the life of this committee and certainly over the life of my engagement with gypsy traveller issues, which has been about 20-25 years, we have seen very, very little progress. The census estimates that there are around 45,000 gypsy travellers in Scotland, most community estimates would place that as about being 20,000. I think that the committee will be familiar about issues of non-disclosure amongst gypsy travellers. If you were to conceptualise those 20,000 people as living in a town, we are talking about a town where the size of Alloa, Renfrew, Dunbartonshire or Elgin, and that town would have the worst outcomes in terms of health, employment, poverty and educational attainment. However, because of the nature of the community that is dispersed and the mobile nature of the community, we do not tend to focus on those things as a group. However, if we were to conceptualise the community as a town, we would be looking at one of the worst towns in Scotland. I would also just return back to the very root of this, which is about prejudice. Just to unpack that, it is about prejudging people. The run-up to this conversation with Michelle about this, and it is something about almost all I need to know about you is that you are a gypsy traveller. You are a gypsy traveller who is older or disabled or a woman or a mother, but the label, the tag is very potent. From our own work, we estimate that we are looking for something like three football pitches worth of land in Scotland to be able to create adequate and appropriate site provision for gypsy travellers, and we do not believe that that is an impossible ask. What we do see is that in the planning processes in Scotland, there is enormous difficulty in getting planning permission for local authority or private sites. It very often attracts very active campaigning from local residents and very often is supported by councillors and elected members, and in many ways I would view the essential problem as being one about land, and one that politicians in Scotland of all parties have been unwilling or unable to address. In terms of a proposal, and I would forgive me for taking a little bit of time to explain this, three years ago the Scottish Government did some internal research that suggested that there were about 750 pitches across Scotland. This is a survey that it did of all local authorities. 13 local authorities in Scotland have no provision whatsoever. Three of those are island communities where we would expect less provision, but we still have 10 out of 29 local authorities where you would expect provision to be where there is no provision, and that is particularly concentrated in the west of Scotland. Of the 750 or so identified pitches across Scotland, two thirds of those are inside two local authority areas, South Lanarkshire and Fife, which I find quite remarkable. When we looked at the explanations and the data, what is very apparent is that in Fife and South Lanarkshire, something quite different is happening in terms of planning, and that there is more of an inclination to grant permission for small family sites. Now, this would be, if you have a small patch of land, you would be having maybe four or five pitches for friends and family to come into. Now, obviously you have to have the money to be able to afford the land. It will not resolve, that in itself does not resolve all of the pressure in the system, but it certainly has a bearing on it. So, the first proposal that we put forward in terms of the planning act, or the planning bill going through, is that there should be a presumption towards granting permission for small family sites where all other circumstances are appropriate. So, the land is habitable, it's not an industrial area or things, but a presumption towards small planning permission for small family sites we think could take some of the pressure, some of the demand out of the system. The other area in which I would draw the committee's attention to is new build. We have a significant amount of new build going on in Scotland, and if you look at a town, Chapel Hall, which is a new town being built outside Stonehaven, there is in the deeds of the town, once they reach a certain size of completion of housing, and I think it's 1700 houses, just over 1700 houses, the developer is required to build a gypsy traveller site. Now, the developer, at this point, is offering Aberdeenshire Council £100,000 to get out of that element of the contract. I'm not going to comment on that, but I think it's a really interesting idea that as if we are developing new areas of housing, there's a real potential here to locate gypsy traveller sites before the ground is broken, that you can then have as many of the issues that have come up in committee about poor access to schools, poor access to healthcare, you can address in a modern site adjacent to a new development. Again, in terms of a recommendation for the planning bill, we have put forward that there should be a presumption towards planning consent for gypsy traveller sites on new build areas. We are not planning experts. I have spoken to some planners who have said that there are potentially some funding problems about this. If it's a private development, how will the private developers recrwp that funding? I think that this is an issue which government and this committee could look at very favorably, but to me it's an issue extending bridging loans and credit to developers to enable them to do that. For the first time in a long time, two potential ways of starting to address the issue about land through a presumption of small family sites and new build attached to new developments. To me, the fundamental issue of prejudice comes back to the pressure on land. Gypsy travellers are very often being forced into staying in areas or pitching in areas where they don't want to be, where other people don't want them to be, but this is because of a lack of provision across Scotland which has been evident for many, many years. I'm more than happy to explore any of these things further with the committee and I've really welcomed the opportunity to put something perhaps a bit more positive forward. Thanks very much, Chris. I'm glad that you had the time to elaborate on that. If we speak here from Michelle and Maureen and then come in with questions, if members are concerned with that. Michelle? Thank you. Thanks for the invitation to come back again. It's really hard to believe that it's five years since the care inquiry and the accommodation inquiry, but it's even harder to believe that it's 16 years since the 2001 inquiry, which sparked off a lot of this interest. For my sins, I was involved in that initial inquiry as well, but I also think I need to say that I'm an optimist and I'll come back to that later on because much of what I'm about to say may sound rather pessimistic, but unfortunately that's the world we live in. Also, the evidence that I'll give this morning is based on Mekop's experience of working on a daily basis with gypsies and travellers who are living in rural and urban areas of Scotland. In preparation for today, I had a look over some of the old reports and the reviews and the recommendations, and I think there's five or six common themes that come out which I'd like to concentrate on. One of the first ones, some people won't be surprised to hear, is the need for strong leadership at a national level. There is ample evidence that if some issues are left to local authorities or local providers, there will be no change. That could look at accommodation as one example of that. There is mention of gypsy travellers in many local housing strategies, for example, but there aren't any sites, new sites being built. I think some of the suggestions that Chris has made are certainly worthy of further exploration. Second area is the significant inequalities that exist across accommodation, education and health. To my knowledge, in relation to health, for example, and the high rates of long-term conditions, there are still no targeted or focused campaigns on some of those issues. There's also, thirdly, a pressing need to improve engagement with gypsy travellers. Too often we're still hearing they're hard to engage with, they're difficult to engage, they don't want to engage. Sorry, surely we're beyond that. The onus is on the service providers to find ways to engage, to creative ways, innovative ways. Sometimes it's not even about being creative, sometimes it's just about speaking to people and being respectful and really listening and acting on what's been heard. There are examples of what works up and down the country. Very often these have been led by small voluntary organisations, but nevertheless there are examples that can be built upon or be perhaps used as templates to improve practice. Because of the reluctance to engage with gypsy travellers, I think there's an ever-widening gap between what service providers and civic leaders think the issues are and think the situation is and what the reality is for many gypsy travellers, what their experiences are. That gap was highlighted in the 2012 and 13 reports, but I think it continues to widen. As I said earlier, there are examples of good practice, but very often these are localised or short-lived, quite often on a shoosering budget, but nevertheless they're in schools, they're in museums, they're in the field of mental health, but they could be built upon and they could be continued. What's missing is a robust and a national strategy which is fully resourced, adequately monitored, has appropriate timescales, both in the short term, medium and long term, and it needs to be outcome-focused with smart objectives. Those are things that most of us in the rest of our lives see on a regular basis, you see strategies which are smart, but unfortunately in relation to gypsy travellers, at national level, we haven't seen that strategy. Finally, as Chris said, I believe the biggest issue and what we hear from our case work on a regular basis is about discrimination and prejudice. There are appalling levels of impartiality and professionalism among some service providers, and you don't have to look far in the media or in policy documents to see examples of stereotyping and negative reporting, which thankfully would be completely unacceptable in relation to other communities within Scottish society. I think that the stereotyping and the prejudice affects every single gypsy traveller in Scotland, whether you have been directly discriminated against or not, you are all being tarred with the same brush. The Government's own research has highlighted how entrenched attitudes haven't really shifted very much over the last few years, and these attitudes affect all gypsy travellers, whether they are living in a house or living in a site, whether they are young or old. They affect teenagers who are trying to access restaurants or clubs. They affect children and students in university who are not seeing their history and their culture recognised or the contributions of their ancestors acknowledged in society. They affect men and women who are trying to gain unemployment, who are being told they need to change their name or their address in order to access a service. They affect carers who are trying to get adaptations in their home and they are not being able to do so because they happen to live on a gypsy traveller site. Long term, this affects the way community members view the world. It affects the way the services they access, the way they bring up their children, who they do and don't engage with. It affects their sense of belonging within Scottish society. In many cases, that is severely lacking. Since 2001, there have been various calls for, and they have had various titles, but sometimes it has been called a public relations campaign. Sometimes it has been called awareness raising. More recently, it has been called zero tolerance towards these attitudes and this kind of stereotyping. To date, those campaigns have failed to materialise. There are opportunities now, I believe, around hate crime to prioritise these issues, but they need to be in there at the beginning and they need to be at a significant level. I said at the beginning that I was an optimist and that might surprise you, but I truly believe in that because Meacop works with a lot of strong and proud individuals who are active and engaged, not only within their own community, but within society more generally. Those people have a wealth of experience and ideas that they would welcome to share. They are sharing them, but they will all be at a local level on quite a small scale. Finally, I just wanted to end with a quote that really touched me. We have been running some bespoke short breaks with gypsy travellers and the people they care for over the last couple of years. Contrary to the idea that gypsy travellers are hard to engage with, there has been a waiting list for every event over the last two and a half years. A carer for a teenager who has learning disabilities living in a rural area that we work in attended one of those breaks recently and it is fair to say that she was very reluctant to attend having had quite negative experiences of respite in the past. However, she came along and her quote to a staff member in the car going home was, I really felt like I belonged, and then she paused and said, and that doesn't happen very often. Thank you. That says a lot, doesn't it? Absolutely. Thanks very much, Michelle. Maureen. Thank you. Thanks very much for having me here. I think that this is the first time I've been at this committee, although my predecessor from STEP was here. So thanks for having me. I understood just to give you a general overview of what our work is and where we feel that additional work is needed within education specifically, but I think about education in the broadest sense. At STEP, we've revised the way that we work over the last three or four years. We're based at the University of Edinburgh and we started off by gathering information both from the literature because we're quite research-focused from Gypsy Traveller communities and from school staff. In doing that, a lot of our work has chimed with what has already been said here today. We've had to actually devise new methods for actually consulting and collaborating with the Gypsy Traveller community and we feel as though we've actually made some success in doing that. In doing that, some of the findings, the information that has evolved from these processes, has been really alarming and actually has proved to be a bit more concerning than even the current information that we've got would lead us to believe. We try to work in partnership with communities in everything we do and then we take our findings and we disseminate them on a national level. You'll all be aware of the fact that within education Gypsy Travellers in the last... Well, obviously from the 2011 census to the 2013 census, 15 census, there has been very, very little improvement in educational attainment in attendance. There has been an increase in exclusions and we can think about that in terms of the bullying conversation I think that we have today. So again, the patterns that are being described before that there's very, very little change. There's also an issue for me in terms of actually gathering evidence in the first place because statistics for me in relation to Gypsy Travellers mean very, very little. We know that many, many young people and their families choose not to identify as Gypsy Traveller even though they're entitled to do so. So we have the problem of young Gypsy Travellers being in school and not getting the additional support they need and the social, emotional and educational problems that arise are not attended to in the way that they need to be. And also we have the problem of not having a true count of the number of Gypsy Travellers who are not in receipt of any form of education in Scotland and we believe that these numbers go into their thousands, not hundreds. So this kind of leads me on to the whole notion of Scottish education and one of the issues I have at the moment is that we do have really effective policies in place and a lot of these have been attended to over the last three or four five years with the additional support for learning the Children's Scotland Act with the work that's been done on GERFEC and of course starting to think about UNCRC and how we actually bring that into ongoing policy and schools. So if I take for example the additional support for learning act I just think it's a really good way to measure the problem. In the policy there's a whole list of criteria that makes a child eligible for additional support such as being bullied and interrupted learning not attending school regularly being looked after things like that. But for me the ones that would ensure an effective additional support package for gypsy travellers are soft descriptors and very very often it's not explicit enough and gypsy travellers fall through the net and are not in receipt of the support that they actually need. The counterargument that may come from the normative view of education would be but we've got effective services we've got effective policies why are they not able to be delivered and the argument and I think I have a business case for this there is an additional piece of work that needs to be done for society to reach out to gypsy traveller families in particular not just the children but the families and give them the assurances that Scottish education is now a flexible thing that it can actually give them the learning pathways that will secure their economic futures because that's really what families are interested in. When we did a survey of families we asked what were the main barriers to education and I can just give you a couple of them here the main reason that gypsy traveller parents give for not allowing their children to go to secondary school specifically although many go to primary is bullying and discrimination and our view in step and many other agencies is the fact that this is actually a narrative that they've inherited within their culture and actually we think it can be challenged many schools are very adept at dealing with bullying and discrimination now and we've been working in a lot of training packages with local authorities and schools and at national level and we can see a real shift but the parents haven't changed their attitudes what this then leads on to is a huge responsibility being placed on the child so the stories that we see are children going to primary school and actually doing very well excelling in fact in terms of educational attainment when they are regularly attending and their peers are going on to secondary school and they are left with the burden of trying to make sense of the culture of the home and the culture of the education world in Scotland and this has actually been shown to lead to quite significant social, emotional and behavioural difficulties within the children so imagine a child sitting in a classroom while everybody else goes to do the transition to secondary school and they are not allowed to go because their parents will not let them so we've been doing some work with families on this and we've got lots of solutions or potential solutions whereby there are halfway houses we can have extensions of primary school in other buildings even in primary schools we've got three or four head teachers in Scotland at the moment who are willing to offer rooms in their school as extensions to the primary learning as a bridge into a future in education I can also report that there is an increasing number of children who are leaving primary school because of cultural I suppose pressure at the age of eleven going to live the life of the family whether it's there's a real gender divide here as well so we've got a lot of girls who work in the caravan with the parents and carry out domestic duties but boys who go off and work with their fathers and continue the family businesses but many many children and young people are now turning up at alternative education places like community centres, libraries and asking for additional support or some kind of education at the age of fourteen fifteen so I just feel in Scotland nowadays we should be able to kind of bridge this divide, this big gulf the word I think which is key to all of this is transition it's actually getting children into school in the first place and supporting families to do that and we've got models of practice that show how to do that successfully getting children between the primary school and the secondary school and then getting children to a positive destination because most families will tell you nowadays that their traditional work patterns can't support their future generations so that's a major problem have I got time for one more issue is that alright just to touch on I think probably the most worrying thing we obviously have structural issues which I think we need to address in terms of making the secondary school a more flexible place at the moment gypsy travellers run from secondary school because they know if they enroll they can get tracked so they think it's easier not to do it in some places I've been able to negotiate teachers, head teachers with schools local authorities and say can we be flexible can we say to them join and then we'll allow you to leave if you do want to dip your toe in the water but the main thing I think which is a real barrier and it's really concerning is the attitudinal barriers which are still coming from staff and also I think institutions and I think there's a really fine line between the people and the institution and I can give you one quote from last week where we were doing some outreach work within a local authority and the school that we were working with had to ask for permission from within the authority from the senior management team and one of the comments was well don't make it too good because they'll all come running so we're still dealing with that it's absolutely shocking but again we've got policy and we've got guidance and we've got practice that could be addressing that for example the GTC's lifelong learning and development for teaching staff has got a huge section on integrity and social justice where professionals are required to examine their own personal and professional values, beliefs and assumptions and I just think we need to do so much more work in that area and I think that's probably the key to an awful lot of the challenges that we face within the bullying discrimination and attendance challenges that we've got in primary schools at the moment in secondary schools at the moment, thank you Thanks very much, Maureen a lot in that and in different aspects from all of our witnesses this morning we're going to go straight into questions if you don't mind I've got Mary up first and then Alex being a champion for this cause for a long time and I suppose both of us should declare an interest and being honorary members of the showman's guild for past endeavours so we should actually probably declare that to be honest in this inquiry but Mary if you want to continue your questions Thank you very much and good morning in some ways it's good to see you but I have to say I am disappointed that we are once again talking about gypsy travellers and the issues that gypsy travellers have and certainly the anecdotal evidence that I have is that nothing or very little has changed since the last report was done in 2013 and what I wanted to do was read out bits of some of the recommendations to get your thoughts on whether anything at all has actually progressed or anything has been done so recommendation 46 was that responsibility for support of gypsy travellers lies across many Government portfolios and local authorities and it is crucial that an existing Scottish Government Minister is given a specific and overarching responsibility for support and profile raising of gypsy travellers 47 says there is a very real possibility of increased apathy among the gypsy traveller population we strongly recommend that the Scottish Government launch a national public awareness raising campaign aimed at tackling discrimination and racism and I suppose if you think about the show racism on the red card and how successful that was and how everyone bought into that I honestly cannot understand why that has not been done for gypsy travellers recommendation 49 there has been a failure of leadership at local community and national level recommendation 80 it's essential that gypsy travellers as site tenants have the same rights and responsibilities as people living in fixed housing I kind of suspect what your answer is going to be in all of this but I'm going to read it all out anyway and the final conclusion paragraph 136 and it says 12 years on from the first Scottish Parliament inquiry into gypsy traveller life it is galling to see the appalling situation of many gypsy travellers is little changed we are staggered to find ourselves hearing the same issues and making the same recommendations that we heard in 2001 there must be strong leadership at all levels but the need for a powerful ministerial voice is abundantly clear the time has come for the Scottish Government to take matters in hand with a national strategy to support local authorities and local councillors in developing fit for purpose housing strategies and finally we say it's crucial the work is carried out at both local level to encourage the settled community to accept the gypsy traveller way of life and at a national level through a government led public awareness campaign and I want to finish in much the same way that Michelle did lifting a quote from the report that we did in 2013 and it's a quote from Donald Stewart who was one of the gypsy traveller witnesses that came to speak to the committee and he said it has been all talk and we have not seen any action it's about time that something got done because neither we nor other travellers are benefitting no sites are being built we are not seeing any difference as just as hard as it used to be has anything changed? Very little I think one positive move is the inclusion of gypsy traveller sites in the Scottish housing charter and the fact that the housing regulator now has that role to inspect sites and the minimum sites guidance that is in place but I would caveat on that by saying its guidance and it's perhaps not strong enough because there are countless examples of where guidance has been put in place and has been blatantly ignored at a local level The housing regulator did a thematic inquiry into gypsy travel sites and made a number of recommendations as well and many of those recommendations have been put through to the end Not that I'm aware of we did some training that was led by gypsy travellers earlier in the year with the regulator and one of the reasons for that was to try and highlight to them sometimes it's not just about asking questions or getting evidence from social landlords sometimes it's about understanding the context and the power relationship to use but one example that has been put in their thematic report In the period I think it was 2013 to 14 7 of the social landlords of the 7 of the 15 who gave returns on service user satisfaction said that there was 100% service user satisfaction on gypsy traveller sites 7 out of the 15 that was actually during the same period that Mary and other committee members were out on sites and suffered themselves and I don't have the quote to hand but I think it was words to the effect of appalling and horrendous conditions on site so somebody somewhere is missing the point to put it very very blatantly but nevertheless the fact that the regulator has a role in relation to sites I think is positive but it probably needs to be much further go much further Chris Positively we do have the regulation of sites which will come in 2018 that is a very long lead in period and it means that many gypsy travellers have continued to live in inappropriate and poor housing conditions which has been commented on repeatedly by the committee and also by international commentators there is largely I think the tenancy rights on sites have become stronger and perhaps there is an encouragement to adopting more of a bespoke more of a national template approach to it which I think is encouraging oddly and I don't know if Michelle and Maureen will agree with me we have seen some success in the small and particularly Scottish press it's rare now to see bulletin boards in the Scottish local papers which used to be filled with very reverent comments and I've spoken to a number of editors who have said it's not worth the hassle any longer as the committee will probably know we publish guidance to editors and it's unique that we have never heard of it to publish guidance about any other group of people in Great Britain for newspaper editors other than Gypsy Trafflers I can't say that that is mirrored by the national tabloids who still regularly if you go on to their sites you will see extraordinary hateful comments there so we have had some progress I would however pick up up on two things if you'll allow me just very briefly whilst I agree that we need to have consciousness raising in public campaigning I think it needs to be quite targeted at the particular groups of people and this may be homeowners elected members who are who have the most negative attitudes and I think we also need to think about how we do this because a lot of these kind of public attitudes things are based on contact theory which is essentially the more that you know about this group is a misunderstanding and if you know more about this group you'll actually like them I think that actually this is a conflict situation where we have two groups of people with opposing rights and we need to do something more about trying to mediate in that situation the other issue which I would pick up about the failure of leadership I would completely agree on that but I think it's also about the relationship between central and local government excessive governments in Scotland have pulled away from a national strategy which would imply or infer that they tell local authorities what to do and in this case it's about site provision and I think that there could be far greater emphasis from national government in the relations with local government that this is a Scottish wide problem it's not something which is unique to one local authority and we need a Scottish response to this not an individual local authority response because what we see is many local authorities simply shifting the buck to others and what alarms me from the Scottish Government's own research is the almost complete absence of sites in west central Scotland we know there is demand but there is no provision and I find that quite extraordinary because certainly the message that came over loud and clear from local authorities when we were doing this inquiry was that they wanted the government to have a national strategy they wanted the government to tell them you must build sites and there was more than one reason for that because obviously if the government compelled them to build sites they then have someone almost to blame and that's what they wanted they wanted to be able to blame the Government and say look we've been told to do this because they do get a lot of negative press for lots of reasons I don't care to go into but local authorities shy away from standing up for the gypsy traveller community and don't want to build sites because of the comments that they get from people that live in their area so they want a national strategy has any progress at all been made in the housing needs assessments for gypsy travellers because that was a particular issue as well I was very briefly I haven't looked at all of them there's a common issue in the housing needs assessment and it's not unique to gypsy travellers I've also looked at it from a disability point of view and whilst there may be a description of the issue and the needs what we do not see is a response to those needs in the investment programmes so it will describe and particularly the one that I'm conscious of was the Glasgow and Clyde valley one and this is local authorities predominantly saying that there is no need and I find that quite extraordinary that there is no need in Ayrshire for gypsy traveller sites that just doesn't seem to make sense to me Can I just ask a follow-up question around an awareness raising campaign some kind of strategy because I mentioned the show racism the red card but I don't think any kind of strategy to raise awareness and try and break down the barriers that gypsy travellers face every day it wouldn't work unless gypsy travellers were involved in that campaign so do you think that gypsy travellers are ready to become involved in that given everything that's happened to them since 2001 with inquiry after inquiry after inquiry and promise after promise after promise would they still want to be involved in something like that I certainly can't speak for gypsy travellers generally but what I can say is that a lot of the people we work with are ready to and are already actually doing things to raise awareness in their own local communities whether that's by getting involved in our case exhibitions such as Moving Minds or whether it's Leading Training workshops they're out there speaking to people trying to raise awareness and becoming more confident in doing so but it's certainly true that there are levels of apathy and given what we've just heard that's completely understandable but I would completely agree that gypsy travellers have to be at the core of any kind of campaign and I think it's also worth being in mind some of the recommendations from the Christie commission and just being cognisant of the intergenerational cycles and the dangers of communities and individuals who are marginalised being left behind and I think in relation to gypsy travellers there's a real risk of that happening yet again There's a very quick comment on that and I've got a quick question maybe directed to you Chris Whilst I would completely agree with Michelle that it is immensely desirable for gypsy travellers to be at the heart of a campaign the problem is not of gypsy travellers making and I think it's really important that the locus for change is about Scottish society, it's about settled communities it's about politicians it's about service providers it's not the responsibility of gypsy travellers to do that The results of the latest social attitudes survey in relation to gypsy travellers it's horrifying and if I cast my mind back to the inquiry that we did last session and all the myth-busting stuff that the gypsy travellers did it's so ongoing Michelle, do you see benefit in something like that being rolled out across every single school, every local authority every elected member do something like that? Yes, it's the short answer to that it is still going on but as I hinted at earlier unfortunately it's in very local areas but there are examples of campaigns from Ireland there's a new campaign that was just launched in London a couple of weeks ago a hashtag campaign which is along the lines of this person is a mother a carer a volunteer and also their gypsy traveller but why do people always just focus on that one label? I'll explain I want to go actually I want my question to be honest and it is on the back of the that's-en briefing that we had with Professor Curtis that he drops in lots of other characteristics apart from mental health and gypsy travellers both of these were still up in the high 30s and it strikes me I was on the education committee between 2007 and 2011 we put through the additional support needs plans and there was a huge emphasis on maybe more or no comment on it a huge emphasis on education and maintaining education especially for young people who had additional support needs as well so there maybe needs to be a look at whether that's actually working or not it strikes me in relation to a strategy so we've got the national sense of figures on prejudice we know what they say we've got sights and planning consent where we have strategy and policy in there we have health and social care where there is policy in there as well and we have education and additional support needs with this policy in there as well it wouldn't take a huge leap to create a strategy from all of that and link it together so I suppose one question to use about that label and whether actually you need that label one of the specific powers that this place now has is to add additional protected characteristic groups to the equality act and whether it is maybe now time to use Sean's phrase that he gave me to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut with us that we actually need to put in a specific recommendation where in the equality act a specific protected group which would focus minds as well because when it becomes the law it compels people to do things within the law is that something that would be a way forward I mean we've obviously looked at lots of aspects of this this morning and hopefully looking for some way forward but would that be a way forward that would maybe create that better outlook for the families and the young people that we're talking about Maureen, I was wondering whether you had anything to add or a comment on that For me absolutely because we've just finished the consultation for the guidance it's got ministerial approval obviously for improving educational outcomes for young people from mobile cultures and it links to all the policy that you've just described but as I said earlier when I was describing some of our issues it's not explicit enough in the policy and what you're describing there would absolutely make that stand out and it feeds into the whole leadership discussion as well because the people that we work with do fantastic work and a project by project basis on a local authority by local authority basis there are great examples of practice and things are changing but each of these people we run a network of representatives that reach the local authorities in Scotland and I would say the majority of them feel unsupported within their authority in terms of the leadership and the resources that they actually need to do the kind of work that they're doing so the things that do make leaders stand up and take notice are what you're describing I think it has to be much much more explicit and I think a protected character so it would be fantastic Okay Alex Chris, do you want to come back? I really do on that point Gypsy travellers are already covered by the equality act it is quite clear that they are covered by the equality act prior to the case which defined that in Scotland the presumption from the Scottish Government from the police, from the equality and human rights commission and everybody else was that they were covered they just hadn't gone to court I think it's a red herring myself, I don't think that the protection is there what is being done with that protection is the issue so a national strategy which focused on trying to address some of the deep-seated inequalities that Gypsy travellers face would be welcome I think that creating a specific protected characteristic for a group who are already covered by the law is unnecessary and I think is actually a distraction Fair comment Fair comment Alex Good morning to the panel and thank you for coming to see us this morning I found your contributions absolutely fascinating I have to admit that this is an area I don't know very much about but you've certainly addressed some of that the gaps in my knowledge today my interest in a lot of what you've said has been particularly around children in Gypsy travellers communities and I'd refer everyone to my register of members' interests in that I used to be the convener of the Scottish Alliance for Children's Rights and worked for an organisation that did do some work with Gypsy traveller communities Maureen Ewing did a really good job of telling us about the additional support for learning needs of young people in these communities what I'm keen to know about is those who are under supervision because on any given day in Scotland we have 15,000 children who are looked after the majority of those are looked after at home and it strikes me that there are very particular individual needs in Gypsy traveller communities for those young people who are under supervision and looked after at home because if those homes are moving then it would be particularly difficult to offer that kind of social work supervision and I just wonder if you could explore some of the particular challenges around offering support to young people who are looked after at home in those situations The honest, very few Gypsy travellers that I know of and Michelle might correct me here are looked after at home in mobile situations where a child is removed from a family will tend not to be a mobile family that the child will go to where there are welfare concerns with Gypsy traveller children who are still within their family the same interagency working setup will kick into action so I'm not question When I say looked after at home I mean they're not taken away from their family unit they're just given extra support in the same way that children and mainstream families who are taken under supervision aren't taken away from their families they're just given the extra support of social work intervention and they're under supervision order from the children's panel I imagine the same must be true for some families even in itinerant lifestyles who are nomadic that needs more and if it's not it makes me troubled that we're not getting to these young people because if as Chris said the life outcomes for these communities are demonstrably worse across the board then that suggests to me there should be a higher proportion of young people who might need to be taken into supervision and we might not be getting to them I think there's definitely an issue with children who we would call who are under the radar who don't actually who don't go to school I think the minute they're in school then the systems do kick into place and we have the same sort of guidance and each have a named person will have a coordinated support plan if they need that for the children who don't go to school it is quite a muddy area in terms of who then within the local authority takes responsibility for the welfare of that child and particularly if the children are not registered at all or enrolled and very often we find that their health number disappears off the radar as well so that's never ever passed on to the education authority and that's a real live issue, it's a problem definitely I've known about looked after children having worked in the sector for 15 years is that local authorities will do everything they can to avoid being the ones that have to carry the financial can for the support that's offered or that they are responsible for that supervision order so if these families are moving around then it makes it almost easier for local authorities to not have to take that up and finally I can see Chris trying to come in here and I'm glad of that there's nothing in between being enrolled and not so local authorities I think are very very happy but not happy not deal with children who are not enrolled within the authority yeah well that travels me greatly I'm slightly uncomfortable with the premise perhaps behind the question and I think that what Maureen has said is very clear that the predominant reason why gypsy traveler children are not attending schools because of bullying or because of parental fear of bullying to then have a social work intervention on the basis of being a victim of somebody else's actions to me doesn't seem appropriate that's what I was suggesting at all every community supervision orders are classless you need to take children into care at some stage in every community in Scotland the demographics are such that the percentage of children in deprived communities who are under supervision order is much higher in some cases but that's because not because of their lack of attendance at school, that's because of chaotic family lifestyle factors or parental desertion or a huge range of issues why children need to be taken under supervision I wasn't suggesting for a minute that it was because they weren't turning up at school we did a bit of research with families we did it for the Roma community for the show family community and for gypsy travellers and we looked at the wellbeing indicators across the board for each of these communities and I can maybe back up someone what Chris is saying it was very clear that you couldn't jump to assumptions about the normative view of what being nurtured or safe might be for example for a gypsy traveller community so for example they may be running around 14-year-old or whatever but they tended to not have any concerning levels of wellbeing I accept all of that and there are cultural norms in those communities which are very different to the ones that we would recognise however I'm still troubled by the fact that you yourself referenced that group of young people who are under the radar and whilst I'm a big supporter of gypsy traveller communities I find the culture fascinating and it's part of our rich tapestry of Scotland but that said there will always be difficult situations where children are at risk and if they are under the radar and they're not known to social services they are more at risk than equivalent children who we find more easily or aren't as you say under the radar so I'm not worried about anything about cultural aspects of gypsy traveller life which would be strange to us in the way that we perceive the world I am worried about those who still in those families that are chaotic where neglect happens where abuse happens that we aren't necessarily as good at applying child protection legislation or with the children's act to give these children the care and support that they need through the state Hi, can I just pick up on an issue that's related to what you've just said the issue of mobility is another red herring I think the vast majority of gypsy traveller families that we work with and in fact I've worked with over the last 25 years are not actually moving they're not able to move they're living in bricks and mortar but they're still facing the kind of prejudice and discrimination that we've spoken about earlier one small example we did some research on self directed support amongst gypsy travellers and whether there was an appetite for it and where the barriers might exist a couple of years ago the main barrier identified by social work was mobility the fact that people were on the move the main barrier identified by families was prejudice I think because of the word traveller it's become a bit of a myth that people are constantly on the move that is not possible anymore it may be something that people aspire to be on the move for sure but I think there's sometimes a tendency to overly concentrate on the mobility aspect and there are many other aspects of the culture and heritage which are overshadowed by that Chris I'm not aware of any research that's been published or unpublished which looks at levels of neglect to abuse between gypsy traveller communities and other communities so whilst I appreciate that there is an anxiety that children may be off the radar that does not mean at all that they are being neglected or abused and I think we need to turn the issue around and say why are families and children disengaging from the rest of society what is the issue to me I think we come back to this issue again of what's the responsibility of the education authority and individual schools here there was a survey done I forget the MSP's name for a second where they did an FOI of racial incidents recorded in schools in Scotland in the last three or four years and there was a massive variation some areas I think actually one was South Lanarkshire where they recorded two or three in Edinburgh they recorded 150, 200 now one of the things that we are particularly concerned about is that whilst there may be very good practice in individual schools that is not a uniform experience across Scotland we have written to the minister really in urging them to put in place a requirement on local authorities and education authorities to record and publish racial and other forms of bullying in schools and also in capturing that information to actively work with other services particularly the police particularly in housing I suspect as well because it's unlikely that prejudices being expressed in schools is only expressed in those schools it is going to be part of a community so I think we need to look at why gypsy travellers are not engaging and I think it's because there are legitimate fears which have been already addressed by Maureen about the likelihood or certainty of bullying in harassment I want to try and get on with some of the other members David, you wanted in with a quick question I think Mary's covered most of it as I've probably expected her to do there's 32 local authorities in Scotland and you highlighted in your evidence earlier that two local authorities were very good I think two thirds of the travel sites were in these two local authorities South Lanarkshire and Fife of officials in the other local authorities that is not on my doorstep basically their attitude because I cannot see how two local authorities could provide so many sites across Scotland and there's 30 local authorities there basically just ignoring the needs of the gypsy travellers the vast majority of sites in these two local authorities in South Lanarkshire and Fife are from private hands so it's an issue about planning and planning consent I perhaps 20 years ago I would have blamed officials and I think there was a level of prejudice and I'm sure there probably still is I think more and more when I speak to her officials is the level of exasperation that they identify areas where sites could be built they take them to committee the committee knocks the thing back to me it's an issue about politicians and a discipline inside parties rather than a problem of an administration or the administration of these things Can I come in on that point is that not to do with the local authority going out to community and consulting with them and saying this is what we will provide in the area Catching that I'm saying is that not to do with the local authority going out into communities and saying this is what we plan for the area this is a consultation to do with local authorities and leaving it in all these fears We published research three years back Phil Brown from Salford University and what we did was say what are the circumstances which make a good site and one of the things which came across very clearly one was from a gypsy traveller run site in Scotland where the engagement with local planning officers and councillors they said was absolutely instrumental the other was I think in Carlisle Michelle I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong on this where there was significant engagement with local communities around the site prior to the site being built to the point of taking them to other areas and saying look our house prices haven't collapsed we haven't been subject of mass criminality it's some of these very basic misunderstandings misconceptions and prejudices that need to be addressed but I think politicians are responding to local pressure but their job part of the role of politicians in this the general equality duty which is a specific requirement on local authorities is that they need to foster good community relations what I do not see in fact bizarrely Aberdeen in returning down a site four or five years back cited it would be dangerous to community relations if we allowed the site to be built I find this a very strange tortured logic thank you thank you very much Jeremy good morning and again thank you very much for coming I mean I think there are issues that Alex has picked up on which I think we do need to develop further but I know time is it against us I want to come back to a couple of questions that I have in regard to what you were saying Chris in regard to planning again I suppose I should say I am just retired from being a councillor here in Edinburgh for a few years on the planning committee in Edinburgh so my first question is very just really a factual one is what's your definition of a small family site I don't have one there is no definition I think that's something which the Government could be looking at as a rule of thumb what I observe is sites of maybe four or five pictures on a piece of land owned by a gypsy traveller are possibly far less than an acre I don't have a I would suggest that if the committee feel that this is an area worth exploring it's something they may want to work into we are happy to do that as well but to actually start to define obviously for the purposes of a bill what do we mean by a small site but I think a presumption towards consent is really where we're trying to go with this my second issue is again it is more kind of a question one and it's around the presumption for planning I mean clearly one of the issues presumably I don't know the answer is land valuation that in certain parts of Scotland value of land will be more than others is there any research done where the community already owned that land the presumption should be there is there much land owned by the community already I was unaware of that my presumption was that we would be looking to literally buy the site financially first and that was one of the issues as well or is it the other way around the owner land but can't get the planning permission again I mean I'm not expert in this but particularly looking at press reporting and what I perceive to be happening is that because of a frustration around a lack of local authority provision individuals in the community either have or are acquiring land where they are saying well actually my family, my friends can stay here but it's I think what we're looking for ultimately is a network a patchwork of provision across Scotland whether that is in local authority control housing association control private control I'm not particularly bothered myself but I think that we need to get over this hump of planning consent because that is what's holding back the development of sites and my very very funny quick question again a bit like Alex this is not an area where I would claim to have well much expertise at all and in fact I did a quick survey of some of my well colleagues in my parliament to ask which minister is responsible for this and the answers were very low in regard to getting the answer correct so I think even amongst us as politicians there's a lack of ignorance in this area but I suppose that it was just a quick one back to you Michelle I've always got the impression it's people who are moving around do we know what percentage or what figure of the community are still moving around still have that ability and how many are more permanently based in one site No, we don't have accurate numbers Chris referred to the 2011 census which included a category of gypsy travellers for the first time and there was over 4,000 people who ticked that box but there are many thousands more gypsy travellers who for whatever reason feel that they have to deny their ethnicity for fear of the prejudice that they may encounter and those are very often people who are living in bricks and mortar and it may be that we're living next door to some of those people but sadly they still feel that they have to deny their ethnicity and there are no accurate figures either of those moving around or those settled I mean again and I appreciate I come to this very new so this is a question of ignorance what I can't quite get in my head round is and if you can maybe once you can explain it is I understand if you're travelling round there are issues there if I'm living in as you say bricks and mortar maybe next to somebody I go on to the school and register how do they know I am part of that community because I'm living in a normal whether normal means flat house so is the issue with the school or is it with I think one of you said the historical view that the fewer we get bullied that isn't actually a reality in practice and that's what I can't quite get in my head round if I'm living in a kind of community here in Edinburgh but how will we look at school and know I'm part of that if I don't declare it Maureen might want to come in on that particular point about school but there are many ways in which people could be identified as coming from a Gypsy Trafford community it could be through their surname it could be by the kind of work that they're engaged in it could be I mean we've had examples of people who lived in lived in a flat in Edinburgh for example and she felt that she had to tell her relatives not to come and visit her because they drove a particular kind of vehicle or they were engaged in particular kind of work and she felt that that would let her neighbours know that she was a Gypsy Trafford in relation to school do you want to in relation to schools I mean we have stories of some young people have gone to university and using false addresses in houses for their entrance information because they felt that they would be discriminated against but I have to say the issue of mobility I think chimes differently with each of the concerns to do I mean my area is only education and mobility is a huge issue still in Scotland with education we have schools where we can have 20 young people turn up on a Wednesday morning unexpected and schools have to very very quickly be able to cope with that bring in additional staff and then they may find that the children have moved on and they are led with extra staff and problems with budgeting so there is a real instability Syswmwyllian, do you have a feel for how many people are travelling we can only give you anecdotal accounts I mean I can give you loads of each local authority will give you an anecdotal account every Trafford education officer or Gypsy Trafford liaison officer will keep account of the numbers of Traffords who go through their authority all the time but that's not a national there's no national mechanism for keeping that information again I think there's an issue between those people who would like to travel but who are unable to because traditional travelling sites have been shut off bordered off the lack of provision and those people who for educational purposes or health purposes feel they have to move into bricks and mortar housing so I think again we're talking about an issue of culture we're talking about an issue of economics Gypsy Traffords travelled to work very often as well now increasingly the opportunities to travel have been broken down because of the traditional stopping places the private sites closing so I think we I understand your concern it's an area which bedevils the whole issue of Gypsy Traffords is that we have so little hard evidence there's a well quoted figure of male life expectancy amongst Gypsy Traffords being 55 something like that but we have no we have no health studies that's the word of why this may be we know there's an issue but we're not going into it in any depth so I know that there's not a huge amount of desire in the community for more research but I think there is something about general statistics about incidences of heart disease or things like that that we couldn't should be picking up I think I just highlighted health and health inequalities is something that we should maybe take a closer look at and we've just conducted an inquiry on destitution and the impact that has on health and the ability to access health to maintain on-going treatment and it strikes me that there would be similar situations for Gypsy Traveller communities as we looked at for people we had one case where the TB nurses managed to track someone who was resistant to their medications so they needed additional support for 12 months over 13 different addresses so it's quite a similar scenario on how do we make sure that people get the right healthcare and that strikes me as maybe an area we need to shine a bit of a light on one of my concerns is the committee's last two reports one on housing and then one on health and care the housing one has had a lot of focus and there's been a lot of work on that so we've seen things like tenancy rights we've seen things about minimum standards I have not seen any similar response from the NHS or from social work in Scotland to the committee's recommendations and that worries me enormously because we're talking about an absolutely fundamental issue of if you're not healthy you're unable to participate economically, socially, civically and I am concerned that an institution with the resources of the NHS has no defined approach to investigating or addressing what are believed to be really worrying health inequalities in the community it's where maybe an analysis on a strategy pulling out all the threads that we talked about earlier would show where the gaps are Mary a very brief follow-up question on health is there still evidence that GPs are turning away gypsy travellers? Because that was one of the things we found when we did the inquiry into care that gypsy travellers were being refused access to GPs, is that still happening? From our case work there are examples of people being asked for additional evidence additional proof of identity in order to be registered with a GP I think we're pretty exhausted any other members got anything else to add? Is there anything else that you think we've not covered this morning that you've got an issue you want to say Chris is almost out of stock straight away? Okay, by apologies No, please please don't apologize at all because we're really keen to hear from you I think it's interesting with the change in remit in the committee and the embracing of human rights issues for a long time I felt there's limited pressure there's limited gains that can be made through the Equality Act the issue is something far more fundamental than that I think that adopting a human rights approach to gypsy travellers when we look at things like adequate healthcare, adequate accommodation the ability to participate economically or socially or civically is actually far more compelling and I think it's really interesting that increasingly we're seeing international groups, whether that be the Council of British Isles or the UN Rapporteurs actually starting to focus on the human rights issues which we need to engage and I would really encourage the committee to start to perhaps move away not move away from the equality issues but to embrace the human rights arguments and concepts as much as the equality ones I agree the Council of Europe current affairs committee which I currently sit on delivered a report when just a few months ago and it was led by a Manchester councillor across the whole of Europe a strategy on a European wide strategy and it was health education so it's maybe worth our well getting a copy of that report for everyone to have a look at that as well because you're saying about the UN the Human Rights Act, the things that we're doing but there's really good practice across the whole of Europe that maybe we could tap into and raise a profile on this and continue to support about the human rights element of this committee because I think if we take a human rights approach to all of this then that's when we get, we pick out where the good things are but where there is gaps and we should tackle those. Michelle did you want to come back in? Just a couple of very small things in relation to health and social care to borrow a term that's often used in the mental health field I think there's very often we encounter examples of what's known as diagnostic overshadowing whereby the issue that somebody is presenting with whether that's physical health or it's an accommodation issue or the need for adaptation is actually overshadowed by the fact that somebody is a gypsy traveller so it's seen as oh that's a gypsy traveller issue or the gypsy travellers are the problem and that actually leads to the real issues being ignored or overlooked and the second thing that I just wanted to very quickly raise was Scottish Government had an equality outcome from 2013 to 17 one of the eight equality outcomes was a specific outcome on gypsy travellers that they would like to see that gypsy travellers experienced less discrimination by 2017 and that was to be welcomed where now the Government have just set their new equality outcomes for 2017 to 21 and what we have this time are eight broad themes and there's very little specific mention of gypsy travellers and given the lack of progress I think that's very disappointing and perhaps a missed opportunity again to try and have a robust or clearly focused strategy or direction even in place OK, thank you. That's good to know Maureen. Is there any final comments? Only to say really that I think is a massive opportunity it's often not tapped into enough in terms of community cohesion building relationships with the families as well and any consultation that we've ever done that's been successful has always been as an extension of the education sort of school community so I think all of these issues also I suppose thinking about health a lot of our initiatives have been through working with oral health visitors in schools and they've actually had more impact reaching out to communities in health education programmes than others have so I just think that the education area is certainly untapped at the moment in terms of... I would agree just from my anecdotal experience of a primary school in my constituency who has very good outcomes and very good community engagement and parents are on the PTA and there is a transition over a high school as well so there is an opportunity where there's good practice where we can highlight that I think we are not finished with this topic if you realise that certainly Mary is and neither she should be and I think the committee have got a commitment to keep an eye on this there's a few recommendations and the evidence that we've heard this morning I think we'll have a discussion about how we take some of that forward and do that to do that but we'll come back to you can we thank you so much for coming along this morning we went well over time but we felt it was valuable to hear as much from you as we possibly could no doubt we'll speak again so thank you so much for coming along this morning, I appreciate it okay I'm going to suspend the committee now to the private session thank you so much