More than 30 extra Gypsy Traveller pitches are expected to be allocated in Pembrokeshire’s forthcoming new local development plan, with the potential for more.

In recent weeks, Pembrokeshire County Council has approved an application for a private Gypsy Traveller site, at Made of More Yard, Simpson Hill, Simpson Cross, under delegated powers, and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority has refused a contentious scheme for a private site a third time at Froghall, Saundersfoot.

Both applications were represented by agent Hayston Developments & Planning Ltd.

At the recent October 21 National Park meeting on the Froghall scheme, members of the planning committee heard from officers there was, based on information provided by the county council from the gypsy traveller assessment 2019, an immediate need for nine pitches between 2019 and 2024, which has been met, and a further need for 30 pitches in the county between 2025 and 2033.

It said the county council has granted permission for 14 pitches on private sites, meeting the 2019 assessment need, and is beginning to make provisions for further need.

Members heard that the county council’s emerging LDP2 was allocating land for a further 31 pitches.

A report for members said: “The existing sites at Kingsmoor and Withybush will be extended to provide a further 11 and five pitches respectively – these are both local authority sites. A completely new local authority site is also proposed, south of Monkton Playing Fields, for 15 pitches (but with the potential to provide more than this).”

It added: “PCC’s LDP2 has hearings scheduled for November, and therefore there is a strong likelihood that the plans will be adopted in the next year, with a greater provision identified within it than the identified [assessment] need.”

At that meeting, Lynne Garnett of the Travelling Ahead Community Planning Project, which provides planning advice and support to Gypsy and Traveller families, put that need at closer to 56 pitches, saying the community itself did not feel it had been “asked the right questions,” the assessment figures not reflecting “the true need of the community”.

Speaking in support of the Froghall scheme, she said local authorities were “constantly failing in their duties” to provide enough sites for Gypsy Travellers, a “systemic failure” in provision leaving them “no alternative but to buy land” for their own housing.

She said prejudice against the community “is enormous, as the orchestrated opposition to this one pitch has demonstrated,” while Traveller families in Wales were “forced into renting poor quality accommodation with no alternative” in a “chronic accommodation crisis” where “demand outstrips supply manifold”.

Earlier this year, members of the county council’s Cabinet backed increases pitch fees and sewerage service charges for gypsy and traveller sites in the county, hearing Pembrokeshire manages five Gypsy and Traveller sites with – at that time – 83 pitches, 77 currently occupied at Castle Quarry, Under the Hills, Kingsmoor, Waterloo and Withybush.

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That report said that historically Pembrokeshire had one of the lowest charging rent figures.