28 CONNORS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT tenure protection covers privately run gypsy sites to which the same considerations would appear also to apply. Consequently the Court is not persuaded there is any particular feature about local authority gypsy sites which would render their management unworkable if they were required to establish reasons for evicting long-standing occupants. Nor does it find any indication that the gypsies would lose the advantage of low financial costs attaching to local authority sites. According to the submissions of the applicant, which were not contested by the Government, local authority gypsy sites do not benefit from particularly low licence fees and in his case he had to pay double the rate of a local authority housing tenancy. 90. Nor does the gypsy population gain any benefit from the special regime through any corresponding duty on the local authority to ensure that there is a sufficient provision for them (see P. v. the United Kingdom, no. 14751/89, decision on admissibility of 12 December 1990, Decisions and Reports 67, p. 264, concerning the regime applicable before the repeal of section 6 of the Caravan Sites Act 1968 and paragraphs 35-36 above). The October 2002 report noted that 70% of local authorities did not have any written gypsy/traveller accommodation policy and commented that this reflected the lack of a specific duty on local authorities to consider their needs (paragraph 58 above). Since the 1994 Act came into force, there has been only a small net increase in the number of local authority pitches. The case of Chapman, together with the four other applications by gypsies decided by the Grand Chamber (Beard v. the United Kingdom, no. 24882/94, Coster v. the United Kingdom no. 24876/94, Jane Smith v. the United Kingdom, no. 25154/94, and Lee v. the United Kingdom, no. 25289/94, judgments of 18 January 2001), also demonstrate that there are no special allowances made for gypsies in the planning criteria applied by local authorities to applications for permission to station of caravans on private sites. 91. The Government have pointed out that the domestic courts, since the entry into force of the Human Rights Act 1998, have examined the Convention issues in similar cases and found no violations of Articles 14 or 8. The Court notes that the High Court has reviewed the lack of security of tenure of gypsies on local authority sites in a number of cases. There is force in the Government’s argument that some weight should be attached to the views of national judges who are in principle better placed than an international one to assess the requirements of the society because of their direct and continuous links with that society. However, in Isaacs, the judge commented that he was not over-impressed by the vagueness of ‘experience’ relied on by the Government in justifying the necessity of the regime (see paragraph 50 above), while in Smith, the judge implied that he would have no difficulty in concluding that there were a substantial majority of gypsies who were no longer nomadic whose position could immediately be safeguarded by some new legislation (paragraph 53 above). The Court