“When I drove passed the site on Thursday evening, I could see that the travellers were still there” said Lib Dem Cllr Dan Barker.

The site in question – Bentley Haye in Rough Wood Chase Local Nature Reserve Willenhall, was a winner of the much coveted Green Flag award.

The travellers had broken onto the site of natural beauty late on Friday afternoon last week. We informed the Council’s Community Protection Team having been tipped off by local residents. The process of getting them off the site began in earnest.

It’s a process which the travellers are well versed in and they know that if offers don’t strictly adhere to it the length of their stay is lengthened. As it stands, all the steps had been completed by early yesterday (Wednesday) and a summons was issued.

If the travellers have not left the site, Walsall Council has a slot booked in at the Walsall’s Magistrate’s Court for an order to evict them.

The Lib Dem Focus Team in Willenhall has asked for an urgent clean up of this popular nature reserve site and for it to be secured to prevent any further unauthorised encampments.

“All this takes up many hours of officer time and the costs of the incursions so far this year is mounting up into the hundreds of thousands of pounds” said Lib Dem Cllr Ian Shires. “I have asked for a review of how Walsall Council deals with this problem as even when officers get sufficient evidence together in order to comply with the onerous requirements within government legislation to get injunctions on worst affected sites al that is achieved is moving the problem around.

“The view that the Coalition administration is coming to is that we need to take the drastic action of identifying one site in the borough as a transit site. By doing this any unauthorised encampments could be dealt with without the need to go through the current process which generally takes between four to five days”.

In council areas where this has been done the number of unauthorised encampments has been reduced to the low single figures.

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