In November 2003 a 6 foot high fence was erected in the Green Belt and the Area of Outstanding Landscape value on top of an earth bund enclosing an area of approximately 1 acre (see paragraph below). This was to become a permanent caravan site for the farm workers. Services were laid within the site and in November 2003 large mobile homes began to arrive on large trailers. These were connected to electricity and water supplies. A long sewage pipe was dug from the farm right across the farm land to a mains sewer in Station Lane, hundreds of metres away.

Some of these mobile homes were occupied over the winter months in 2003/2004 by mainly Polish farm workers who are permanently employed by Hall Hunter. Each caravan can accommodate up to 6 workers and by spring 2004 there were 48 homes mobile homes.

From May 2004 onwards the permanent workers were joined by 250 foreign workers, many of them students, employed by Hall Hunter to pick the fruit. The peak picking season lasts from May until September but the late raspberry crop continues until November, so ‘seasonal workers’ may stay up to 6 months each year in the mobile homes.

By November 2004 the harvesting of the first year’s fruit had come to an end and the remaining temporary workers returned to their homes. Hall Hunter’s permanent workforce stayed on to take down the polytunnel frames and do other winter work. The Halls would not normally bother to dismantle the tunnels, they stay up at their other farms. However in the winter of 2004/5 with a planning inquiry due to consider Tuesley Farm in 2005 they needed to maintain the fiction that the polytunnels would be removed each winter. The mobile homes were also removed from the site.

The permanent workers went back to Poland for about a month at Christmas 2004, but they were back again in very early January to do all the winter work, including planting and maintaining fields. As the mobile homes had been taken away temporarily from Tuesley Farm these permanent workers lived for a time in Hall Hunter’s other permanent campsite at Sheeplands Farm (see below) until 1 March when Hall Hunter brought the mobile homes back out from winter storage from nearby Brook. During the winter period the permanent workers were brought over to work at Tuesley on an almost daily basis in various minibuses.

The mobile homes returned on the 1 March 2005 and some were occupied immediately. If they are given planning permission the Halls want this to be a permanent arrangement. As the picking season starts each year in May, it is clear that in the period after 1 March each year the Halls want to accommodate their permanent workforce at Tuesley in the so called ‘seasonal’ accommodation.