Sir James Cleverly is Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.
The laws and regulations of our country must apply to everyone equally, without fear or favour.
Seeing groups, or individuals, treated more harshly or more generously because of who they are breeds resentment. Discrimination is toxic.
The dispassionate application of the law is a foundation stone of a successful society, and respect for the rule of law is a fundamental tenet of Conservatism.
But that’s not what we are seeing at the moment. From police guidance issued by the College of Policing, to the handling of the grooming gangs scandal, we see different groups explicitly being treated differently.
To add insult to injury the people who break the rules most blatantly seem to be the ones treated most leniently, or not penalised at all.
All of these things undermine faith in the rule of law, and make people doubt whether it is worth them sticking to the rules. If others get away with breaking them, you’re a sucker for not following their lead, right?
As an Essex MP, I know there is one area in which criminality is going unpunished, and that is the erection of illegal traveller camps and the breaking of planning law.
Two things are happening, and they are both doing significant damage to local trust in the system.
Firstly, a small minority of travellers are buying plots of land, setting up their caravans, sometimes even laying down permanent structures, and then asking for retrospective planning permission.
All too often, they are getting what they want. Local councils and police forces lack the power and the resolve to evict them. The people breaking the law cite the ECHR and other human-rights laws as an excuse. They claim that they are entitled to a place to live and the planning rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to them. Rather than being punished for breaking the law, these groups are getting away with it.
And in other cases, where land has been allocated for travellers they break the terms of their agreements, for example, by setting up 12 caravan pitches when they are only supposed to have six. Again, planning permission is often sought retrospectively and gained.
Imagine a comparable example. You own your own home and you decide to build an outbuilding that impacts on your neighbours’ properties. You don’t ask for planning permission until afterwards, because you know you won’t get it. What will the council do?
They will punish you. They may even force you to demolish the building, or do it themselves and make you pay for it. But in many cases, the same no-nonsense approach is conspicuously lacking when it is travellers committing the same offences.
That’s what we mean when we talk about a two-tier planning system: travellers who break planning law are treated more favourably than everyone else.
The last Conservative Government took measures to try to fix the problem. We passed laws granting the power to ban travellers from returning to encampments for a year, in an attempt to stop the perennial problem of travellers finally moving on only to return months later.
But thanks to activist lawyers who took the case to court under ECHR, the law was never enforced. There is a whole industry of often pro bono barristers waging lawfare to ensure travellers get to break the rules and get away with it.
Labour ditched our plans almost as soon as they took office and brought in a much weaker option. We also changed planning rules to give councils more powers and ripped up John Prescott’s top-down diktats, but Angela Rayner has now reversed these changes.
Things are so bad that Labour are actively trying to conceal the situation. They have reduced the data collection on unauthorised sites, meaning we now only get one set of figures per year. Since travellers move around at this time, we don’t get an accurate picture.
I recently commissioned the House of Commons Library to research the situation to get a real sense of how things have changed over the past couple of years. The numbers are staggering. In the two years to January 2026, the number of traveller caravans on unauthorised sites rose by 1,080 across England.
Think about the impact that has on the local community, having to handle a huge encampment in its midst with all the pressures that brings to the local environment and local services.
And think about the effect it has on faith in the rule of law when despite clearly illegal, these sites persist and sometimes even get approved after the fact.
So what can we do about it?
Leaving the ECHR, as we are committed to do, will give us new freedom to ensure that the law applies equally to all.
This will allow us to stop traveller cases being treated as an ‘equality’ matter, and end the abuse of retrospective planning permission by stopping approval for sites where there has been a material change of use. Anyone who wants to live on land in a caravan will have to get permission first.
We will also give police the power to ban travellers from returning to sites indefinitely, as well as making it a criminal offence to trespass on land with a vehicle after being told to leave.
Our approach is two pronged, in that it will empower both local councils and the police to take the necessary action to get the problem under control.
The Conservatives are on the side of those who play by the rules. And we will always stand up for them.
Sir James Cleverly is Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.
The laws and regulations of our country must apply to everyone equally, without fear or favour.
Seeing groups, or individuals, treated more harshly or more generously because of who they are breeds resentment. Discrimination is toxic.
The dispassionate application of the law is a foundation stone of a successful society, and respect for the rule of law is a fundamental tenet of Conservatism.
But that’s not what we are seeing at the moment. From police guidance issued by the College of Policing, to the handling of the grooming gangs scandal, we see different groups explicitly being treated differently.
To add insult to injury the people who break the rules most blatantly seem to be the ones treated most leniently, or not penalised at all.
All of these things undermine faith in the rule of law, and make people doubt whether it is worth them sticking to the rules. If others get away with breaking them, you’re a sucker for not following their lead, right?
As an Essex MP, I know there is one area in which criminality is going unpunished, and that is the erection of illegal traveller camps and the breaking of planning law.
Two things are happening, and they are both doing significant damage to local trust in the system.
Firstly, a small minority of travellers are buying plots of land, setting up their caravans, sometimes even laying down permanent structures, and then asking for retrospective planning permission.
All too often, they are getting what they want. Local councils and police forces lack the power and the resolve to evict them. The people breaking the law cite the ECHR and other human-rights laws as an excuse. They claim that they are entitled to a place to live and the planning rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to them. Rather than being punished for breaking the law, these groups are getting away with it.
And in other cases, where land has been allocated for travellers they break the terms of their agreements, for example, by setting up 12 caravan pitches when they are only supposed to have six. Again, planning permission is often sought retrospectively and gained.
Imagine a comparable example. You own your own home and you decide to build an outbuilding that impacts on your neighbours’ properties. You don’t ask for planning permission until afterwards, because you know you won’t get it. What will the council do?
They will punish you. They may even force you to demolish the building, or do it themselves and make you pay for it. But in many cases, the same no-nonsense approach is conspicuously lacking when it is travellers committing the same offences.
That’s what we mean when we talk about a two-tier planning system: travellers who break planning law are treated more favourably than everyone else.
The last Conservative Government took measures to try to fix the problem. We passed laws granting the power to ban travellers from returning to encampments for a year, in an attempt to stop the perennial problem of travellers finally moving on only to return months later.
But thanks to activist lawyers who took the case to court under ECHR, the law was never enforced. There is a whole industry of often pro bono barristers waging lawfare to ensure travellers get to break the rules and get away with it.
Labour ditched our plans almost as soon as they took office and brought in a much weaker option. We also changed planning rules to give councils more powers and ripped up John Prescott’s top-down diktats, but Angela Rayner has now reversed these changes.
Things are so bad that Labour are actively trying to conceal the situation. They have reduced the data collection on unauthorised sites, meaning we now only get one set of figures per year. Since travellers move around at this time, we don’t get an accurate picture.
I recently commissioned the House of Commons Library to research the situation to get a real sense of how things have changed over the past couple of years. The numbers are staggering. In the two years to January 2026, the number of traveller caravans on unauthorised sites rose by 1,080 across England.
Think about the impact that has on the local community, having to handle a huge encampment in its midst with all the pressures that brings to the local environment and local services.
And think about the effect it has on faith in the rule of law when despite clearly illegal, these sites persist and sometimes even get approved after the fact.
So what can we do about it?
Leaving the ECHR, as we are committed to do, will give us new freedom to ensure that the law applies equally to all.
This will allow us to stop traveller cases being treated as an ‘equality’ matter, and end the abuse of retrospective planning permission by stopping approval for sites where there has been a material change of use. Anyone who wants to live on land in a caravan will have to get permission first.
We will also give police the power to ban travellers from returning to sites indefinitely, as well as making it a criminal offence to trespass on land with a vehicle after being told to leave.
Our approach is two pronged, in that it will empower both local councils and the police to take the necessary action to get the problem under control.
The Conservatives are on the side of those who play by the rules. And we will always stand up for them.