RECENT coverage in the Gazette about travellers was unbalanced and unfair.

A nomadic lifestyle is not wrong, it is not illegal, it is just different from that of settled communities. All human beings were nomadic once.

Gipsies and other traveller communities have been present in this country for at least 500 years. They are a part of our country. They are entitled to healthcare. Their children are entitled to be educated.

The settled communities have enclosed more and more land, excluding travellers from camping there. The local authorities who for decades had duties to provide sites for travellers failed to do so. There is massive under-provision of sites, thus many travellers are forced to stop on unauthorised sites. A traveller family who cannot station their caravan in any authorised place are homeless people, entitled to be helped, not ostracised.

Yes, some of them do anti-social things. So do some members of settled communities – as your newspaper regularly reports. Do our councillors raise an outcry that the latter should be hounded out of Colchester? No.

As for the rubbish travellers leave: all human beings produce waste. Settled communities produce vast amounts: go to Stanway tip, walk along the public footpath and see and smell the landfill and leachate pools, or visit a waste transfer station and see the huge trucks to-ing and fro-ing full of our waste. Managing all this waste takes a lot of organisation and expense.

If there were enough properly equipped designated sites for travellers to use, their waste could be dealt with in an equally organised way.

Instead of stirring resentment, elected representatives should call for better provision for the traveller community which is being badly served by the authorities.

Jo Hayes

Greens Yard

Colchester

SO ONCE again some travellers have wantonly set up another illegal camp, this time at Hilly Fields, Lexden.

Colchester and Tendring councils tell us their budgets must be cut yet again and they don’t know what more they can do to save money.

Well, first of all, start prosecuting travellers who break the law. That would instantly save thousands of our taxpayers money to clear their mess up. If a member of the ordinary public were to do what some travellers do, setting up camp on land they do not own, causing criminal damage and fly-tipping, the authorities would not hesitate to track them down and prosecute.

Yet time and time again some travellers just do as they please and nothing is done.

Vic Wiggins

Knox Road

Clacton

THANK you to the Gazette for correcting their editing anomaly in my recent letter referring to the police and how they deal with errant travellers who illegally camp on public or private land.

I wanted to go one step further to clarify that my letter was only talking about travellers who come to Colchester on holiday and potentially enter land illegally and therefore break the law.

We have many travellers living in Colchester amongst us quite happily either on purpose built travellers sites or in houses and they have always been extremely welcome being a very proud part of our community.

I know they also frown upon illegal encampments as the potentially illegal activities of a few cast unfair aspersions on the majority of the law abiding travelling community who happily live amongst us.

Cllr Martin Goss

Axial Drive

Colchester