The Scottish Government

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INTRODUCTION

The background to the counts

Gypsies/Travellers have been a small but distinctive element of the Scottish population through hundreds of years. From the 1890s to the mid-1930s a number of government inquiries addressed aspects of their presence, generally within a wider context of other disadvantaged groups. The changing environment of the second half of the 20th century, made the difficulties facing these communities more evident. The Scottish Office commissioned detailed national counts of these communities in Scotland for the first time in 1969 as part of a major study ¹, covering not just their numbers and distribution but also their lifestyles, problems and needs. In the light of the study's findings new policies were developed by the Scottish Office, aimed in particular at provision of a network of places where they might legally stay while enabling them to follow their traditional work and seasonal movement patterns but also to improving their access to many of the other forms of service, such as education and health, generally available to the wider Scottish population. Associated with this was the establishment of an Advisory Committee to maintain an overview on progress on all matters affecting Scotland's Travelling People.

During the 1970s and 1980s a number of individual Scottish Councils and other agencies made sporadic localised counts. No further comprehensive count across Scotland was undertaken until the spring of 1992 ².

In 1997, with a view to establishing a more effective long-term Scottish information base the Advisory Committee piloted a new system of twice-yearly counts. In the summer of 1998 these counts were introduced by the Scottish Executive on a regular basis involving a return from each Council providing information on number of households and other aspects of use for official council sites, privately-owned sites and unauthorised

encampments at the end of January and July respectively. The reports on these counts summarise the data from the returns and set these in the wider all-Scotland context. This summary, the eleventh in the current series ³, covers the January 2007 counts from the following perspectives:

• The development of site provision over time, including both additions to and losses from the overall provision of pitches on council sites;
• The nature and use of council sites and the people living on them;
• Privately-owned sites used by Gypsies/ Travellers;
• The continuing use of unauthorised encampments; and, finally
• An overview of the current situation in Scotland as a whole, with estimates of the total population of Gypsies/Travellers in January 2007

Each category of stopping place generates different levels of data detail and robustness and the consequent constraints are addressed in their respective sections within the report.

It must be emphasised that, since they were first introduced, the counts have never been intended to include those Gypsies/Travellers who have chosen to live in conventional housing, because of the problems of identifying them within the wider Scottish population. Nevertheless it is acknowledged that, since some within this category may adopt a travelling lifestyle for short periods during the year, they may therefore appear within the numbers recorded in on unauthorised encampments or possibly on privately-owned sites, most probably during the summer season.

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