FURTHER to my previous letter and my research on resettlement camps, the official thinking after 1947 was sorting priorities to help refugees integrate.

Once they were safely here, with families reunited and a home, learning English came next to help them find employment.

At first it was better to live in a community with their own language, customs, traditions, churches and schools.

Then as they settled down they could be free to move out and integrate into our towns and villages when they felt able to, and had to when the camps were eventually closed by the late 1950s.

Last spring, I wrote to Prinknash asking whether temporary accommodation could be provided in the ‘New’ abbey but I was told it was in a very poor state of repair, awaiting demolition with no water supply.

The county council have closed our special needs schools and are selling them off, (like the small farms which I flagged up several years ago) which is another scandal, yet these schools could have housed refugees.

Talk about selling off the family silver.

But there is another large derelict building just down the A38, Newport Towers, which could be used.

Given the materials to make it habitable, refugees could make homes there, creating gardens to feed themselves as they rapidly did in the 1940s.

Not a hand out but a hand up.

In times of national emergency, surely the government still has powers to requisition private property.

Our house was after it had been bombed, then patched up for a homeless family, meanwhile we had found a flat to rent.

Jenny Bailey

Stroud