A TRAVELLER mum-of-three fears her little boy might miss out on school next week – all because the council won’t help her family.
The 23-year-old woman, who didn’t want to be named, feels like she’s been forced out of caravan sites for the last SIX years with her young kids.
Her community settled down in Sheerness, Kent, on Monday after moving from a nearby site – but they immediately received backlash from furious locals.
Unhappy residents of the rural town and the youth football club all raised their voices in uproar at the travellers’ arrival, prompting the Swale Borough Council to take action.
Now the group have been given a strict order to leave the premises tomorrow and move their families elsewhere.
But the young mum is vexed that the council hasn’t helped to allocate her family anywhere new, saying they’ve been left “homeless” and have nowhere to go.
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Although the travellers do not have permission to be pitched on the site, the woman blamed the council for forcing them to invade fields by providing no other options.
The community said it is trying to find a settlement space and doesn’t want to stay in their current position – but they don’t know where else to turn.
The anonymous traveller has a four-year-old, one-year-old and seven-week-old baby to look after and wants some consistency for them.
She said: “I’ve got a four-year-old boy who is due to start school this month but he won’t get an education because we have nowhere to stay.
“How can he go to a school when we get moved every week?”
Her community needs somewhere for more than 20 cars, 4x4s and vans as well as more than a dozen white caravans – so she wants the council’s help.
“We’ve been looking for somewhere for six years in total,” the woman said, “There are loads of empty ‘Gypsy Sites’ that Kent County Council have which we could use, but they are refusing to help.
“On the ‘Gypsy sites’ we would pay rent and council tax and that’s what we want to do but they aren’t doing anything about it.
“There are so many empty plots. We feel like we are being led on by the council, but we are scared to confront them about it because we don’t want to upset them. “
One main reason why the community are being hurried on tomorrow comes down to complaints from the local football club.
New Road FC, a youth club that plays matches at weekends and trains on the Festival Playing Field, cancelled all its sessions this week after the community parked up.
Darren Stock, 34, the club secretary, said there is a lot of frustration among the kids and teams who are anxious to reclaim their pitch.
He said: “We just want to get our own pitch back as soon as possible.
“The club has had to cancel all training, and we had just started a girls football team which we’ve had to cancel all the games for due to lack of available pitches.
“This is hugely disappointing as there was a lot of excitement about the new team.”
But the traveller mum said that locals’ complaints are unfairly stigmatising her community, inviting locals to play on the field whenever they wanted.
She said the group had deliberately stayed off the boundaries of the pitch so that football training could continue.
Standing in her caravan doorway, the mum said: “Don’t be scared of us, we have nowhere to go, we don’t want to be here, we are homeless.”
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The council has told the community to leave the field by tomorrow but she isn’t sure what their plan is.
A Swale Borough Council spokesman said: “We visited the unauthorised encampment at Festival Field in Sheerness yesterday to carry out our initial assessments and are now in the process of getting a date and time for them to leave.”
