Thank you for the invitation to come back again. It is hard to believe that it is five years since the care and accommodation inquiries, and it is even harder to believe that it is 16 years since the 2001 inquiry that sparked much of the interest in the matter. I was, for my sins, also involved in that initial inquiry.
I am an optimist. I will come back to that later on, because much of what I am about to say might sound rather pessimistic. Unfortunately, that is the world that we live in. The evidence that I will give is based on MECOPP’s experience of working daily with Gypsies and Travellers who live in rural and urban areas of Scotland.
09:45
In preparation for coming here today, I had a look at some old reports, reviews and recommendations. Five or six themes came out of those that I will concentrate on. People will not be surprised to hear that the first of the themes is the need for strong leadership at national level. There is ample evidence that some issues being left to local authorities or local providers means no change—accommodation is an example. There is mention of Gypsy Travellers in many local housing strategies, but no new sites are being built for them. In that regard, some of Chris Oswald’s suggestions are worthy of further exploration.
The second theme is that significant inequalities exist across accommodation, education and health. In relation to health and the high rates of long-term conditions, for example, there are—to my knowledge—still no targeted or focused campaigns.
The third theme is that there is a pressing need to improve engagement with Gypsy Travellers. We are still hearing too often that they are hard to engage with—that they are difficult to engage with and do not want to engage. I am sorry, but surely we are beyond that attitude. The onus is on the service providers to find creative and innovative ways to engage. It is sometimes not even about being creative, but just about speaking to people, being respectful, listening and acting on what is heard. There are, up and down the country, examples of what works. They are often led by small voluntary organisations, but they are, nevertheless, examples that could be built on or used as templates to improve practice.
Because of the reluctance to engage with Gypsy Travellers, there is an ever-widening gap between what service providers and civic leaders think the issues are and what the situation is—what the reality is in many Gypsy Travellers’ experiences. That gap was highlighted in the 2012 and 2013 reports, and I think that it continues to widen.
As I said, there are examples of good practice, but they are often localised and short lived. They are often done on a shoestring budget and are found in, for example, schools, museums and mental health services, but they could be built on and continued. What is missing is a robust national strategy that is fully resourced and adequately monitored, that has appropriate timescales in the short, medium and long terms, and that is outcome focused with SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely—objectives. Those are things that most of see regularly in the rest of our professional lives; we see SMART strategies but, unfortunately, not strategies at national level for Gypsy Travellers.
As Chris Oswald does, I believe that the biggest issue is discrimination and prejudice, which we see regularly in our casework. There are appalling levels of lack of impartiality and lack of professionalism among some service providers. We do not have to look far in the media or policy documents to see examples of stereotyping and negative reporting that would, thankfully, be completely unacceptable in relation to other communities in Scottish society. I think that stereotyping and prejudice affect every Gypsy Traveller in Scotland. Whether they have been directly discriminated against or not, they are all being tarred with the same brush.
The Government’s research has highlighted how entrenched attitudes have not shifted very much over the past few years. Those attitudes affect all Gypsy Travellers, whether they are living in a house or on a site, and whether they are young or old. The attitudes affect children, teenagers who try to access restaurants or clubs, and students at university who do not see their history or culture recognised or the contributions of their ancestors acknowledged in society. The attitudes affect men and women who are trying to gain employment and are told that they need to change their name or address in order to access a service. The attitudes affect carers who are trying to get adaptations made to their homes, but are not able to do so because they happen to live on a Gypsy Traveller site.
In the long term, that affects the way that community members view the world. It affects the services that they access, the way that they bring up their children and whom they do and do not engage with. It also affects their sense of belonging within Scottish society—which in many cases is severely lacking.
Since 2001 there have been various calls for campaigns—sometimes public relations campaigns and sometimes awareness raising campaigns. More recently there has been a call for zero tolerance towards the attitudes and stereotyping that I have described, but to date such campaigns have failed to materialise. There are now opportunities in terms of hate crime to prioritise the issues, but they need to be included at the beginning and at a significant level.
I said at the beginning that I am an optimist, which might surprise the committee. However, I truly believe that I am. MECOPP works with a lot of strong and proud individuals who are active and engaged not only within their own communities but in society more generally. Those people have a wealth of experience and ideas that they would be glad to share. They are already sharing them, albeit at local level and on a small scale.
Finally, I want to end with a quotation that really touched me. We have been running bespoke short breaks for Gypsy Travellers and the people for whom they care. Contrary to the idea that Gypsy Travellers are hard to engage with, there has been a waiting list for every event over the past two and a half years. A carer for a teenager who has learning disabilities and who lives in a rural area in which we work attended one of the breaks recently. She was very reluctant to attend, having had quite negative experiences of respite in the past. However, she came along and in the car going home she said to a staff member,
“I really felt like I belonged.”
She paused, and then said,
“And that doesn’t happen very often.”