Bradford has an "image problem" which a lot of people are working very hard to overcome, with some success. Their efforts will not have been helped by the arrival of around 25 travellers' caravans plus cars, vans, lorries and horses on the city centre's main car park off Vicar Lane.

This is sited right alongside the route which is used daily by many thousands of vehicles travelling past Bradford between the Aire Valley and the motorway. They will not get the best of impressions as they drive along.

In purely practical terms, the travellers are occupying scarce parking spaces for which commuters pay £2 a day. Those commuters will have had to find somewhere else to park, which is not an easy task in Bradford at present. The Council will have lost the revenue from their parking charges. It will also have to incur the cost of taking out an injunction to move the travellers on, and of cleaning up any mess they leave behind.

A cheap, fast-track system of enabling local authorities to move travellers off their land is long overdue. Meanwhile, Bradford must suffer the irony of having to cope with more than its fair share of these unofficial camps despite being a local authority which has done a lot to provide official accommodation.

There are three official sites in Bradford, all currently full. Councillor Jack Womersley has pointed out that neighbouring authorities have made nothing like the same sort of provision. If they had done as much as Bradford to accommodate travellers, we might not have to endure these repeated - and costly - invasions.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.