Towards the end of the New Labour period of government, the National Equality Panel published a government-commissioned report on inequality in the UK (Hills et al, 2010). Packed with luminaries from the social policy and economics disciplines and based on a wide-ranging data analysis, it made a series of major recommendations addressing inequality across the UK between social classes, genders, ethnic groups and geographies. Compared with what might have been written ten years earlier, the analysis of minority ethnic groups was fairly detailed, although clearly gaps in data remained and some of these are currently being addressed by further research programmes. What the report said – indeed, was able to say – about the position of Gypsy and Traveller people was, however, very limited indeed. Gypsy and Traveller children were noted as falling further behind in terms of attainment at school, largely through an analysis of the Pupil Level Annual Schools Census. Even the size of the Roma, Gypsy and Traveller population was a matter of estimates, ironically, the best coming from the Council of Europe, which suggested that there were perhaps 300,000 (200,000 housed and 100,000 in caravans and thus generally non-sedentary) in 2002.

The National Equality Panel made a few further comments about the position of Gypsies and Travellers in the UK, for example about difficulties in finding site provision that was adequate in quantity and quality, on barriers to adequate employment or on accessing appropriate healthcare provision (drawing on the limited research available, much of it authored by those responsible for this book), but was forced to conclude that, despite such data as was available being ‘very striking and of great concern’, only the National Pupil Database provided any reasonably comprehensive data. Otherwise, there were huge gaps in the data available on ‘other aspects of this community’. What is striking about this and many other reports on minority ethnic groups is that the UK Gypsy and Traveller population is as numerous as, for example, the Bangladeshi UK population, yet the former has been resident in the UK from about 500 years ago, while Bangladeshi settlement in the UK almost entirely dates from less than 50 years ago (Craig et al, 2012).