10. Submissions on Behalf of the Traveller Movement by Mr Willers KC

Mr Willers: Thank you very much, my Lady, I can see you.

Lady Hallett: I know, I’m going to have a word with somebody afterwards. I think when people are speaking I think we have got to rearrange the seating plan. It’s all very well when you’re just sitting there making notes, but …

Mr Willers: Exactly.

My Lady, I appear together with Mr Chris Jacobs, who sits on my left, interrupted by Mr Martin Howe to my right, of Howe & Co, on behalf of the Traveller Movement, and can I begin by expressing out thanks to your Ladyship for having granted the Traveller Movement core participant status in this important module of the Inquiry.

The Traveller Movement is a registered charity and the largest representative body engaging with national and local government for and on behalf of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities in the United Kingdom.

Just to say something about the terms “Gypsy”, “Roma” and “Traveller”. It’s a term frequently used by policymakers and researchers to describe a range of ethnic groups including English Romany Gypsies, Scottish Gypsy/Travellers, Welsh Gypsies and other Romany people, also Irish Travellers, who have specific Irish roots, and Roma, who are understood to be more recent migrants from central and Eastern Europe, and all of those are protected against discrimination by the Equality Act 2010.

But the term “Traveller” can also encompass other groups that travel, including but not limited to New Travellers, Bargee Travellers (that is, itinerant live-aboard boat dwellers) and Travelling Showpeople.

Estimates place the total population across the three main constituent communities at about 300,000 to 500,000 people, which would account for over half a percent of the United Kingdom population.

We know that these communities suffer pervasive prejudice and discrimination in their everyday lives, and that includes access to services including healthcare. Indeed, as an aside, something not in the note that we provided, I would draw attention to the fact that the Women and Equalities select committee report of 2019 found that health outcomes for Gypsy, Roma, Traveller people are very poor compared to other ethnic groups, and found that problems existed throughout the provision of healthcare services, from registration and access to discrimination, literacy barriers and mistrust.

These significant and protected minority groups experienced particular difficulties in relation to vaccination during the pandemic, and those difficulties arose from their status as marginalised communities and led to an unequal vaccine uptake by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. On behalf of our clients we ask that the Inquiry specifically investigates two matters in this module.

First, we say it’s important that the Inquiry investigates whether members of these communities were properly informed about the vaccine roll-out and whether adequate attempts were made to dispel the concerns that they held about the safety of the programme.

When doing so, we suggest that it’s important to bear in mind that the government ought reasonably to have known that the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities were likely to be more vulnerable to Covid-19 than the majority population. For example, as a result of failure by local authorities to meet their spatial planning duties to identify land on which Gypsies and Travellers can live in their caravans, around 10,000 Gypsy and Traveller people live on unauthorised caravan sites, whilst many others live on authorised but overcrowded caravan sites. These living conditions often rendered social distancing all but impossible, increasing the risk for those living on such sites, and in particular those with underlying health conditions.

Moreover, as I’ve mentioned already, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities experienced particular health difficulties, which led to increased vulnerability to Covid. By way of one example, a study from 2007 found that Gypsies and Travellers have a higher overall prevalence of respiratory problems than the majority population.

We say that these communities should have been specifically targeted within the vaccination programme, yet there doesn’t appear to have been any evidence of such targeting having gone on.

The second matter that should be investigated, we say, are the barriers to vaccine uptake the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities face. These barriers stem from cultural matters and the difficulties and disadvantages that Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people generally face in terms of access to healthcare and access to information.

We list the following matters, although it’s not an exhaustive list: the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities have a historic cultural distrust of institutional and government authority arising from systemic and long-term societal discrimination and governmental marginalisation.

Gypsy Roma traveller people experience poorer health outcomes than the majority population and are often wary of the potential negative consequences of vaccination. There is evidence that their general cultural concerns about the effects of vaccines on matters such as fertility and infant mortality were not taken seriously by medical professionals.

The communities suffer from poor rates of literacy, which negatively affected the ability of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people to access guidance in respect of vaccination. In particular, there is widespread digital exclusion amongst Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people, with fewer than one in five members of the community having access to or being able to use the internet, and this digital exclusion compounded the difficulties many faced in gaining access to health guidance, information and services surrounding vaccination, especially so in periods of national lockdown and limited movement outside of sites and homes.

Finally, we point to living conditions. We say they’re also relevant. Those Gypsy and Traveller people living on unauthorised caravan sites were less able to register with GPs or access virtual appointments or otherwise engage with medical services for the purposes of informing themselves about the vaccine programme.

The Traveller Movement draws attention to the fact that there is a dearth of up-to-date information on the ability of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people to access health services and on their general healthcare needs. Currently the NHS does not record Gypsy, Roma and Traveller ethnicity in its data directory, and we’d ask you to consider these matters properly, call evidence from witnesses who can speak about the barriers that Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people faced in relation to the vaccine programme, and indeed the data desert in respect of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities during the course of this module.

The Traveller Movement have received a request for evidence under Rule 9 of The Inquiry Rules and will comply with that request and provide witness statement evidence in relation to barriers to vaccine uptake, steps taken to address vaccine hesitancy, public messaging about vaccines and recommendations that the Inquiry should consider in this module.

We also submit that these matters should be the subject of oral evidence. We ask that the Inquiry considers calling the director of the Traveller Movement, Yvonne MacNamara, and the Chair of the Traveller Movement Trustees, Pauline Anderson OBE, to give evidence, along with other witnesses from the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, who will inform this Inquiry on these important issues.

We would also suggest that Rule 9 requests are sent to others, and I’ve listed those in our written submissions but I won’t read through the names of those others now.

It’s important, we say, that the Inquiry receives evidence from a variety of sources because there is a very real possibility that the concerns of members of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities relating to vaccination and/or the uptake of other necessary public health measures will not be met in any future pandemic unless lessons are learned from recent events.

It’s also important that the Traveller Movement is able to consider institutional evidence relating to their interest in the Inquiry in good time. We note what is said in paragraph 39 of the Counsel to the Inquiry’s note for this preliminary hearing that if monthly updates and the provision of disclosure do not provide core participants with necessary information then the Inquiry will consider requiring position statements from state and organisational core participants. We endorse this approach and will write to the Inquiry after the disclosure process begins later this year to request a further preliminary hearing on disclosure should it appear that our client will become prejudiced by any significant delays in that process.

In principle, the Traveller Movement supports the submission of position statements as we think that they can provide clarity and focus for the Inquiry team and help to distill issues concisely.

Finally, the Traveller Movement would like to comment on the stance that the Inquiry has taken on the position of minorities.

My Lady, you’ve recognised the importance of placing the disproportionate impact of the pandemic at the heart of the Inquiry. In your letter to the Prime Minister concerning the changes to the Inquiry’s terms of reference you recommended that the terms of reference be reframed to put possible inequalities at its forefront, so that investigation into any unequal impacts of the pandemic runs through the whole Inquiry. This important recommendation, you said, will ensure the Inquiry is inclusive in its approach, and we note that the terms of reference have changed as a consequence.

Whilst the Traveller Movement welcomes a revised terms of reference underscoring the importance of minorities, it’s a matter of some concern to the Traveller Movement that the position of minorities does not feature prominently in the list of the proposed key lines of enquiry which are set out in Counsel to the Inquiry’s note, paragraphs 58 to 60. The reference to ethnicity in paragraph 59 is not, we would suggest, sufficient to dispel this concern. Echoing perhaps what my learned friend Ms Naik KC said, we would submit that in fact the terms of reference in paragraph 59 should be extended so as to include others who do not fall within recognised ethnic minority groups. For example, the Travellers that I was referring to earlier, Travelling Showpeople, those who live on barges and boats, and New Travellers, they would not fall within recognised ethnic minority groups. And we hope that this Inquiry can accommodate those groups too.

Clearly, the position of minority groups should feature prominently, we say, within the KLOEs, and we’ve identified aspects of the KLOEs in another separate note which I won’t read out.

Moreover, our client would wish to stress that it’s important that the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities are treated as a separate and discrete case within any minority grouping. Our client’s view is consistent with a document headed Inclusive Britain: government response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, published in March of 2022, which states that:

“One of the key principles we hold for demonstrating inclusion is not to lump together different groups of individuals with different perspectives and experiences just because they are not white. Segregating by race in this way is clumsy and actually results in exclusion and not inclusion.”

It’s also, we say, important that the Inquiry addresses the public sector equality duty set out in section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 when considering how the vaccination programme was devised and delivered in relation to protected groups and in particular the marginalised groups that we represent.

In conclusion, we ask my Lady for the following. That the Inquiry maintains its commitment to the consideration of the interests of minority groups but that it treats different groups as discrete case studies so as to avoid a generic and non-inclusive approach to complex issues that will arise concerning vaccine uptake by members of marginalised groups.

Secondly, that the Inquiry commits to specifically addressing whether members of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities were properly informed about the vaccine roll-out and whether adequate attempts were made to dispel the vaccine hesitancy, if that’s a term to be used –

Lady Hallett: It’s not going to be “non-confidence” with respect to – “unconfidence” was a bit, I think – I’ll look at the expressions, but I’m afraid “unconfidence” isn’t something I’m going to go with, but –

Mr Willers: I wasn’t going to push for that, my Lady, but the question is whether or not adequate attempts were made to dispel the vaccine hesitancy, the word I use, that arose from marginalisation and other barriers that they faced in relation to vaccination.

We’ve made, as I’ve said, separate representation to the effect that these matters should be included within the KLOE to which Counsel to the Inquiry has referred.

Then, thirdly, that the Inquiry calls witnesses at the hearings in this module to give evidence which is specifically related to the experiences of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people during the Covid-19 pandemic on the barriers to vaccine uptake and the institutional responses to those barriers.

My Lady, can I just conclude by saying this, that Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people felt abandoned during the pandemic, and we would submit that by taking the approach we have set out in these submissions, and including the Traveller Movement as a core participant, we can ensure that this Inquiry will avoid the risk that Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people are marginalised once again.

Thank you, madam.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Mr Willers.

Right, I think that leaves just one speaker, Mr Stanton, a different hat today.