A legal challenge by a group of eight travellers to their repeated eviction has ended in failure.

The eight travellers had attacked a Crawley Borough Council policy said to have led to their families being evicted hundreds of times with still no official site created for them to live on lawfully.

But Mr Justice Burton ruled at the High Court in London yesterday that there was nothing unlawful or unreasonable in the council's stance. It had not breached the human rights of the travellers, he said.

However, he banned the council from taking legal action to evict them immediately from Dalewood Gardens pending moves to appeal against the decision.

He gave them ten working days to lodge an appeal. If they do so, the ban on the council moving them off the site will then run until the Appeal Court has heard their application for permission to appeal.

The judge said that the problems of the travellers stemmed from a national shortage of appropriate sites, and added that until Government strategies designed to improve that situation kicked in, there was "no answer, at any rate in Crawley, to the claimants' needs".

The travellers, led by James Casey, had asked him to rule that the council's latest moves to evict them from Dalewood Gardens and Bewbush West Playing Fields were unlawful.

Although the claimants and their families are now all living on Dalewood Gardens, following attacks by local residents at the Bewbush site, they challenged the council's decision to launch possession proceedings last September in respect of both sites.

In his decision backing the council's stance, the judge said: "There is plainly a total stand-off. The defendant has an absolute legal entitlement to the land and the claimants have no legal entitlement to occupation."

He said that the "inevitable genesis" of this stand-off was "the inadequacy of the provision of authorised sites nationally".

He ruled: "I am entirely satisfied that the claimants cannot establish a legitimate expectation to be provided a site by the defendant council or to be allowed to remain on a site they have occupied as trespassers.

"On the evidence I am satisfied that no site is available. In any event, I am satisfied that no legitimate expectation giving any basis for challenge by these claimants in these proceedings to the decision to seek and enforce possession with regard to these sites has been established."

He said that their claim of a "closed mind" and of a "policy of automatic or almost automatic eviction" was "unsustainable on the evidence".

He continued: "If the defendant has on very many occasions evicted the claimants, that has, since 2000, been in accordance with their post-2000 policy, and they have on occasion tolerated a site.

"Such evictions are inevitable where there are no authorised or acceptable sites, and constant movement of travellers, not just the claimants. The records the defendant keeps do not identify the names of those evicted, not least because they very often do not know them.

"Although more effort should plainly be made to keep further records, their inadequacy does not, in my judgment, support or suggest, in the light of the evidence I have seen, that the defendant is not keeping an open mind.

"In those circumstances I am satisfied there is no basis upon which to conclude, or therefore declare, that there is an unlawful policy or practice of continual eviction of the claimants', such as is alleged."