Tonight I spent my time writing welfare reports. Not abstract exercises, not box-ticking paperwork, but detailed accounts of how our communities actually live. I wrote about how Gypsy and Traveller communities operate intrinsically: how we form micro-communities grounded in kinship, shared responsibility, reciprocity, and deep connection to place and land. I described how care is collective, how resilience is built through interdependence, and how community is not a policy aspiration for us, but a lived reality.
These are the same realities we are constantly forced to justify. The same realities that are scrutinised, problematised, and too often dismissed by planning authorities, councils, and decision-makers who view our way of life through a lens of suspicion rather than understanding.
After writing those reports, I turned to the current government consultation on reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework. And what I found was both infuriating and revealing.
The very principles our communities are lambasted for — communal living, shared infrastructure, flexible use of land, social cohesion, and interdependence — are now being promoted within national policy as forward-thinking solutions to social fragmentation and housing crisis. Rewritten. Sanitised. Detached from the people who have embodied them for generations.
This contradiction exposes a deep and ongoing injustice.
Borrowed Language, Excluded People
For decades, Gypsy and Traveller communities have been framed as a “problem” within planning systems: a challenge to be managed, controlled, or moved on. Our sites are contested. Our planning applications are refused. Our cultural needs are treated as exceptional demands rather than legitimate expressions of identity and heritage.
At the same time, policy language increasingly celebrates ideas such as “community-led development,” “place-based living,” “social cohesion,” and “flexible settlement models.” These concepts are presented as innovative and progressive, yet they mirror practices our communities have long relied upon for survival and wellbeing.
The difference is not the ideas themselves.
The difference is who is allowed to embody them.
When we live these principles, they are framed as disorder. When institutions adopt them, they become reform.
Colonial Patterns in Modern Policy
This is not accidental. It follows a familiar colonial pattern: extract what is useful, discard those who live it. Culture is taken without consent, stripped of context, and rebranded as policy innovation — while the communities it comes from remain marginalised, criminalised, or excluded from meaningful participation.
Planning reform that speaks of inclusivity while failing to explicitly protect Gypsy and Traveller communities does not correct injustice. It perpetuates it.
Without enforceable recognition, local authorities retain wide discretion — and long-standing bias continues to shape outcomes. Progressive language on paper does not dismantle discriminatory practice on the ground.
We Are Not a Policy Problem
I am tired of being seen as a problem to be solved.
Tired of our lives being scrutinised and restricted, while our ideas are lifted and repackaged by men in grey suits and greyer ties, with even greyer perspectives and narrower outlooks. Tired of being excluded from land, security, and planning permission, only to watch our ways of living reframed as solutions once detached from us.
You cannot criminalise a people while celebrating their principles.
You cannot erase communities and still claim to champion inclusion.
We are not an experiment.
We are not an inconvenience.
We are not a footnote in someone else’s reform agenda.
We are living communities with memory, culture, and knowledge rooted in place and practice. Until policy stops talking about us and starts listening to us — until it recognises our right not only to exist, but to thrive — this cycle will continue: extract the ideas, exclude the people.
And we are done being quiet about it.
