Former Labour councillor Juliet McCaffery defends the recent spate of illegal traveller encampments on the city’s parks and blames the lack of official sites in the city (Argus, May 29).

I would like to ask her exactly where she thinks official sites to accommodate the 64 families currently visiting the city, with all their vehicles, should be?

She seems to think that the new permanent site at Horsdean will solve all our problems.

What nonsense! This will provide a home for a couple of local traveller families. The vast majority of the 64 currently on Wild Park are not local and have homes elsewhere. The official transit site at Horsdean now only has space for nine caravans.

In my view the actions of these travellers should not be tolerated. They pay nothing to the council in rent or council tax, they pay no income tax on money they earn here and they turn our parks into a health and safety hazard.

And to add insult to injury, it is local council taxpayers who have to foot the bill – running to many hundreds of thousands of pounds – for the clear up and eviction.

Why do we put up with it? After over a week’s delay, the police finally used their section 61 powers to evict the travellers from Preston Park only to do nothing to prevent them moving a couple of miles down the road to Wild Park.

All the city’s public parks, nature reserves and sports pitches should be properly protected and any travellers that do manage to break on to them should be immediately thrown off. They would soon get the message.

Cllr Dawn Barnett