Gypsy and Traveller Policy and Systems Change

Unequal outcomes are often recorded as community problems when they are actually evidence that systems are failing.

Proud Gypsy Traveller CIC brings ethnic Gypsy and Traveller evidence directly into policy, commissioning and public decision-making.

We connect what people are experiencing with the structures, rules and institutional choices that shape those experiences.

Policy is never only words

Policy determines whose ethnicity is recorded, whether children feel safe in school, whether families can access a lawful home, whether health services understand the people they serve and whether discrimination is recognised or explained away.

Technical language can hide those human consequences. PGT makes them visible.

We ask not only what a policy says, but what it does to people.

From individual experience to structural evidence

When the same problem appears across different families, services or areas, it should not keep being treated as a series of isolated incidents.

Our advocacy, welfare reporting and community research help us identify patterns: barriers that repeat, decisions that have unequal consequences and services that consistently fail to recognise what communities are telling them.

Ethnicity must stay visible

Policy affecting Gypsy and Traveller people is too often framed mainly around caravans, mobility, sites or nomadism.

Those issues matter, but they are not the whole story. Romani Gypsies, Irish Travellers and Scottish Gypsy Travellers are ethnic communities, and policy must also account for racism, cultural erasure, intergenerational experience and the consequences of being treated as an outsider across generations.

That distinction matters across health, education, planning, housing, social care, policing, employment and public services. If ethnicity disappears from the policy lens, the causes of inequality can disappear with it.

What systems change means to us

Systems change is not another strategy document. It means changing the conditions that keep producing the same unequal outcomes.

• Changing policy where it creates unequal consequences
• Improving how ethnicity is recognised and recorded
• Making services more culturally safe and accessible
• Bringing community evidence into commissioning and accountability
• Challenging discrimination that is being treated as misunderstanding
• Moving consultation earlier, while decisions can still change
• Measuring whether people experience a difference, not only whether an organisation completed an activity

We do not remove the emotion from people’s experiences to make them sound more professional. We combine those experiences with evidence and analysis so institutions cannot easily dismiss either.

What PGT can deliver

PGT can provide policy briefings, consultation responses, community evidence submissions, policy and practice reviews, equality-focused analysis, recommendations, facilitated discussions, presentations to decision-makers and support to make consultation more accessible.

We can work independently or alongside community organisations, researchers, public bodies and specialist professionals.

Bring us in before the decision is made

A consultation cannot create genuine influence if the important choices have already been fixed.

If an organisation wants meaningful Gypsy and Traveller involvement, community evidence needs to be present while priorities, budgets, proposals and measures of success can still change.

PGT will not provide community endorsement for a predetermined decision.

Areas of work

Our priorities are shaped by what communities tell us, not simply by what is currently attracting funding.