What does a squatted site mean?

This year, the Earth First! sum­mer gath­er­ing will be at a squat­ted site. This isn’t any­thing new, as EF! has a long and proud his­to­ry of reclaim­ing space, most recent­ly dur­ing the 2023 sum­mer gath­er­ing at a pro­posed coal mine loca­tion in White­haven, Cum­bria.

How­ev­er, we know the last two gath­er­ings have been on per­mis­sive sites, and we want to make sure that those who have become EF!ers in the last few years are aware of the dif­fer­ences.

What is squatting?

Squat­ting is when you occu­py land or a build­ing with­out the landown­er’s per­mis­sion. This is tres­pass­ing, which is against the law, how­ev­er cru­cial­ly it is only a civ­il offence. This means that tech­ni­cal­ly the landown­er can take you to civ­il court to regain pos­ses­sion of the land, but it’s not a crim­i­nal offence, mean­ing that the police should­n’t get involved, and the crown pros­e­cu­tion ser­vice can’t charge you for it.

Although civ­il tres­pass itself isn’t a crim­i­nal offence, it’s still pos­si­ble to com­mit oth­er crim­i­nal offences while squat­ting. For exam­ple, if you are both tres­pass­ing and inten­tion­al­ly obstruct­ing, dis­rupt­ing, or intim­i­dat­ing oth­ers from car­ry­ing out ‘law­ful activ­i­ties’ on that land, this becomes aggra­vat­ed tres­pass. If you cause any dam­age to prop­er­ty, this is crim­i­nal dam­age. We will not be com­mit­ting any crim­i­nal offences, so this should­n’t be a prob­lem.

But I don’t know how to squat somewhere!

There will be a ded­i­cat­ed group of peo­ple respon­si­ble for set­ting up the site ini­tial­ly. If you are a gen­er­al attendee, just wait for the loca­tion announce­ment on the web­site (prob­a­bly by 10am on Wednes­day 12th August). If you see it, this means the site has been secured and it should be fine to arrive. So don’t wor­ry — you won’t be expect­ed to rock up and be part of the group secur­ing the site with­out your pri­or knowl­edge! Once set up, the site should be fair­ly sim­i­lar in vibes to what you find at per­mis­sive gath­er­ings. There’ll be camp­ing, work­shops, games, food, singing and friends, just like always. We’ll want as many peo­ple as ear­ly as pos­si­ble to make it safer for every­one, so please plan to arrive on the morn­ing of Wednes­day.

How risky is it?

Gen­er­al­ly, squat­ting is not par­tic­u­lar­ly risky. The main avenue open to the landown­er is to take squat­ters to court, to get either a pos­ses­sion order or an inter­im pos­ses­sion order. They both require a min­i­mum of 2 work­ing days notice before the hear­ing, and with our gath­er­ing being just 6 days, leav­ing on the Mon­day after a week­end, it is impos­si­ble that either of these poten­tial orders would arrive in time to mat­ter.

Anoth­er com­mon strat­e­gy is to try to use pri­vate mus­cle to intim­i­date and remove peo­ple from the land. This is legal to a point, as pri­vate secu­ri­ty has the right to use so-called ‘rea­son­able force’ to remove tres­passers. How­ev­er, this is also quite unlike­ly, as we will be a gath­er­ing with at least sev­er­al hun­dred peo­ple. This is far too many for them to con­sid­er vio­lent­ly remov­ing. It will also look very bad for them — we’re just peo­ple who care about the world hav­ing a short, peace­ful gath­er­ing in a way that respects the land we’re on (more than the landown­ers do!)

It is also pos­si­ble that they will call the police, even though we won’t be com­mit­ting any crim­i­nal offences. The most like­ly result will be that a cou­ple of rur­al crime bob­bies will come and have a look, and through a com­bi­na­tion of “this is a civ­il mat­ter, they’re not doing crime” and “oooh look there are rather quite a lot more of them than us, we don’t have enough resources to try to remove them all, and then we’d have to car­ry their tents away too”, will leave and do noth­ing.

We can only talk about prob­a­bil­i­ties — it’d be lying to sug­gest we can guar­an­tee any­thing. How­ev­er, even if the already unlike­ly bad sce­nario hap­pens where lots of goons and/or cops show up, it is even MORE unlike­ly that they won’t allow peo­ple who want to leave to leave. They will be look­ing to remove us at that point — and if that pass­es your per­son­al risk thresh­old and you need to go, that is absolute­ly fine, and they should let you go, as it’ll be what they want too. How­ev­er, we do think that a large response is very unlike­ly — informed con­sent just involves talk­ing about all sce­nar­ios.

What do you think will happen?

The landown­er will prob­a­bly be a bit dis­grun­tled at first, but we’ll explain that we’ll be gone in a few days and we’re not going to dam­age any­thing or dis­rupt any law­ful activ­i­ty, and so the path of least resis­tance will be for them to grum­ble and just wait for us to leave.

Of course, it is pos­si­ble we may fail to secure our pri­ma­ry site. If this hap­pens, we’ll announce a delay on our web­site, and then move on to our back­up site, which will then be announced. This will prob­a­bly be on the after­noon of the 12th (or evening if it is an espe­cial­ly tricky day…)