Travellers should pay their way

I think that in my dotage I must be missing more than my miss-spent youth! Travellers by definition are travellers and as such expect to travel and perhaps therefore it is their human right to travel.
By The Newsroom
Published 11th Jun 2011, 16:39 BST

Providing they travel it seems to me that they would not then need a permanent site, merely somewhere that they could stay for a limited period. It would seem to me that natural justice to travellers and the rest of us would be best served by local authorities providing travellers sites to rent at full economic rents, which would be available for a restricted period of between one night and one year maximum to be determined by the local authority landlord’s discretion.

No traveller would be able to stay longer than one year as, quite reasonably, the travellers would not by any stretch of the imagination be classified as travellers. Of course, it would be possible for travellers to purchase their own land and observe the planning procedures that the rest of us have to negotiate.

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It should go without saying that should illegal camps be set up, such as we have witnessed at several places in the county, then the travellers should face the same draconian style sanctions of the law that we non travellers encounter when we are deemed to transgress. - J H Pearce, Church Lane, Lighthorne.