Introduction

As a number of chapters in this volume testify, Gypsies and Travellers are some of the most marginalised minorities in the UK, with an ever-increasing weight of evidence highlighting the extreme social exclusion and inequalities experienced by these groups in access to housing, health equity and educational attainment (Crawley, 2004; CRE, 2006; Cemlyn et al, 2009). However, other than a consideration of the impacts of changing employment opportunities on family life presented within Cemlyn et al (2009), Greenfields (2006) and research undertaken by the authors of this chapter (eg, Smith and Greenfields, 2012), the working practices and economic status of Gypsies and Travellers have been largely ignored in research focus and policy discourse. This chapter, in seeking to shed light on the changing face of Gypsy and Traveller economic practices and the impact of increasing bureaucratisation and mechanisation on traditional employment opportunities for these communities, draws on both findings from the Traveller Economic Inclusion Project (Ryder and Greenfields, 2010) – to date the leading study into Gypsy and Traveller working life – and a series of projects that explored barriers to work with a focus on the housing experiences of this population (Greenfields and Smith, 2010b).

In order to understand the speed and scale of economic change experienced by Gypsies and Travellers in recent decades, it is necessary to consider their traditional modes of employment and the interplay between rapid social upheaval and economic exclusion. For several hundred years, up until the early to mid-20th century, most Gypsies and Travellers were nomadic, living in tents or wagons and travelling for seasonal work purposes, with the most important modes of economic engagement being trading (for example, via door-to-door sales or at markets and fairs), the provision of entertainment and seasonal agricultural work. Large-scale social and economic changes in the post-war period, which have made many itinerant jobs obsolete, have created profound cultural change for this group, impacting on them, we suggest, even more severely than on many other people working in semi-skilled manual trades. As discussed elsewhere in this volume, a number of factors have made a nomadic life increasingly difficult to maintain:

• • urbanisation;

• • an increasing demand for land;

• • a decline in stopping places;

• • planning laws and successive legislation that have sought to outlaw nomadism and settle the travelling population either on permanent sites or in housing (Belton, 2005).