LIBERAL Democrat MP Andrew George, the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on travellers, said that the Dale Farm eviction should be put on hold.

Mr George told Sky News: "The Government and the local authority are going to be spending up to about £18 million to restore the site to what it originally was, presumably - and that is a scrapyard. It's going to make it the most expensive scrapyard in history.

"I think that both to save money and to be more humane and also to ensure that the people living on this site are given a genuine opportunity to find somewhere else to live or even to regularise the arrangements on that site, they need to be given time rather than sadly - and I think very inappropriately - to be going ahead with the evictions today.

"Simply to make people homeless and to tell them to move onto some other site, when they know full well there are no other alternative sites, is just telling people to move from one illegal situation to another."

Resident Kathleen McCarthy, Yvonne MacNamara from the Irish Traveller Movement, and Joe Jones and Richard Sheridan from the Gypsy Council are due to meet council delegates outside the gate for discussions after 10am.

John Baron, Conservative MP for Basildon and Billericay, said: "I'm hoping for a peaceful solution to this and a peaceful site clearance.

"I think we are going to see a fair bit of negotiation in order to achieve that. But at the end of the day this is a site clearance."

Mr Baron added that the clearance would not be rushed.

"We have always had moral right on our side in this argument, and I want us to maintain that moral right, right through to the end.

"This site will be cleared, but I don't want to sacrifice moral right for speed," he said.