COULD I draw attention to the absolutely diabolical standard of government we are being exposed to over the traveller sites issue.

I refer particularly to the Park Road proposal in central Bournemouth.

The residents of adjacent Cavendish Road have spent the last 30 years raising the area from a nondescript scene of bedsit-land urban decay into a good residential area. Even the council noticed, and uplifted it to the Dean Park Conservation Area.

The idea now is to do something that will make property values decline, but it is more than that; the cause of the decline will be immediately visible to and impact upon the residents, and it is even more than that, the residents will be paying the extra costs.

At the head of the dinosaur that created this scenario, the Communities Minister says that ‘it will reduce crime and improve community cohesion’.

Neither at the head of nor at the extremities of this already bloated dinosaur is there a bureaucrat man enough to work out what to do. Instead a guileless firm of consultants is paid a quarter of a million pounds to pull an insane proposal out of a hat.

The incoherent nonsense spouted by central government really does need to be challenged. A whole raft of urban dwellers, previously without a thought on the lot of travellers, is now up in arms about this ludicrous proposal that should never have seen the light of day in the first place, and should not have cost anything either especially at this time of austerity.

A recent Channel 4 programme entitled Gypsy Blood suggested that some of these people are rather close to the country way of life. Government policy deems that to be immaterial; urban taxpayers are to be forced by the government to take on what the landowners with all their taxbreaks and subsidies will not touch, and pay for the cost, with all the concomitant problems, of providing a few gypsies with a free car park by the sea.

CW WILSON Cavendish Road, Bournemouth