26 CONNORS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT (b) Application in the present case 85. The seriousness of what was at stake for the applicant is not in doubt. The applicant and his family were evicted from the site where they had lived, with a short absence, for some fourteen to fifteen years, with consequent difficulties in finding a lawful alternative location for their caravans, in coping with health problems and young children and in ensuring continuation in the children’s education. The family was, in effect, rendered homeless, with the adverse consequences on security and wellbeing which that entails. The Council, and the Government in these proceedings, took the view that the eviction was justified by a breach of the licence conditions, the applicant being responsible for causing nuisance on the site. The applicant contested that he was at fault. It is not for the Court however to assess in retrospect whose version of events was correct as the Council in evicting the applicant relied instead on the power to give 28 days notice to obtain summary possession without proving any breach of licence. While it was variously alleged by Council officers that the applicant’s licence conditions had been breached due to the unruly conduct of persons on his pitch and contended by the applicant that any problems arose from adult visitors from off the site over whom he had no control, the respective merits of the arguments were not examined in the County Court proceedings, which were only concerned with the fulfilment of the formal conditions for the eviction. The central issue in this case is therefore whether, in the circumstances, the legal framework applicable to the occupation of pitches on local authority gypsy sites provided the applicant with sufficient procedural protection of his rights. 86. The serious interference with the applicant’s rights under Article 8 requires, in the Court’s opinion, particularly weighty reasons of public interest by way of justification and the margin of appreciation to be afforded to the national authorities must be regarded as correspondingly narrowed. The Court would also observe that this case is not concerned with matters of general planning or economic policy but with the much narrower issue of the policy of procedural protection for a particular category of persons. The present case may also be distinguished from the Chapman case (cited above), in which there was a wide margin of appreciation, as in that case, it was undisputed that the applicant had breached planning law in taking up occupation of land within the Green Belt in her caravans and claimed, in effect, special exemption from the rules applying to everyone else. In the present case, the applicant was lawfully on the site and claims that the procedural guarantees available to other mobile home sites, including privately run gypsy sites, and to local authority housing, should equally apply to the occupation of that site by himself and his family. 87. The Government have argued, firstly, that there is a need to exempt local authority gypsy sites from security of tenure provisions that apply in other areas of accommodation. Government policy sought to cater for the