Government force local residents to foot Tax Bill for Travellers Sites Consultation

It is incredible that the Government has landed Epping Forest District Council with a potential £100,000 bill after insisting it carried out a stand-alone public consultation exercise on gypsy and traveller sites in the district.
The district council has already revealed it is spending £50,000 on a consultant who is dealing solely with the issue of where in the district additional pitches should go so there was no need for this massive spend if the Government had let Epping Forest District Council plan for the future needs of travellers in our district as had always been their intention.
The council had said it would include the accommodation needs of the travelling community in its wider consultation arising from the more general targets for housing and employment set out in the East of England Plan.

Despite this the Government issued a directive to the council requiring it to deal separately with the gypsy and traveller issues by publishing a stand-alone plan last September.
While £50,000 is being spent on the council's consultant, the final bill is set to be much more. I reckon that the final cost could reach six figures when staffing costs and the cost of printing the consultation document are included.

The council ruled out sending a copy of the consultation document to every household in the areas where sites were being considered on the grounds of cost. Just how much would it have cost us if they had done that?

The council announced last week that its forward planning team had been highly commended in the authority's Dealing with the Public staff awards. While the team are to be praised for helping people and answering what must have been hundreds of inquiries, just how much officer time has been spent on this issue?

The Government has forced our local district council into spending tens of thousands of pounds unnecessarily. Thankfully this Conservative-led council is well-managed and despite the additional cost has been able to limit its council tax increase to the second lowest in Essex, but even so this £100,000, or whatever the final figure is, did not have to be spent if the Government had not waded in with unnecessary directives. That would have meant our council tax payers could have seen a lower increase in their council tax bills.