There are few issues that cause more strife than the so called travellers issue which comes up like clockwork in Poole and Bournemouth every year.
The solution to this problem is the provision of transit sites, as councils have been urged to do by successive governments for decades.
But in Poole and Bournemouth and south Dorset there are no sites.
The issue is in truth very low political priority. That is until residents are demanding police ‘move on’ travellers and police have to explain they cannot ‘move on’ unless there are sites to move the families to.
The issue is then in the end that of land, and, on that count, this whole issue is not about travellers; it is about near half the population who cannot afford homes or are racked into lifetime renting or lifetime mortgages, because of the ‘land issue’.
Currently government has outlawed as a criminal offence any squatting – often in entirely abandoned property.
And we all know taxation on spare bedrooms is driving many of the poorest in the land out of their homes.
And this with council waiting lists running into thousands with few if any one bedroom flats.
And so the problem of homes, bricks or mobile, gets worse year on year. Desperation for millions to find any home. And government leadership on this – evict people from their homes for a spare bedroom, ‘unlimited fines’ on travellers that do not ‘move on’.
But ‘move to?’ – no-one in government is saying.
Jeff Williams, Jubilee Road, Parkstone
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