Through your paper we would like to apologise to those people who were looking forward to attending the Balearic Ball and provide some explanation for the cancellation. The event was designed to give people in the area a party to remember. With jugglers

Through your paper we would like to apologise to those people who were looking forward to attending the Balearic Ball and provide some explanation for the cancellation.

The event was designed to give people in the area a party to remember.

With jugglers, stilt walkers, live singers, and musicians playing alongside international DJs to create a unique carnival atmosphere.

With less than one week to go, a representative of the Hertfordshire police presumed that this event would lead to alcohol related crime and attract a optimistic level of attendance.

These assumptions were made without discussion with Tri*Funk or consideration to previous events, which we are pleased to state have all been incident free.

Based on these "risks" additional security measures were suggested in the form of additional policing and fencing the surrounding area, both at our cost.

Without sufficient time or resources to meet the recommendations, we had no choice but to cancel the event.

We agree that public safety and reduction of crime in the area is of the utmost importance, but we fail to understand why an event hosted in a marquee on the Heath until 1am should result in any greater occurrence of crime than is normally associated with pubs in town open till the same time, or a club open until 3am, neither of which requires additional policing.

We also fail to understand why an event for less than 500 people to dance and be entertained is so likely to result in alcoholic-related crime it requires nine police officers in attendance, but a beer festival with a previous attendance of 3500, requires no police presence?

If the type of individual who attends our events concerns authorities, they may be interested to know that most of them were also at the beer festival last Sunday!

Thanks to the kind co-operation of the management at NU, we were able to host an event on a somewhat smaller scale.

I am pleased to state that this proceeded without incident and special thanks goes to Alex P who help us create a different kind of evening for the people of Royston, which was our initial aim.

According to Herts police information desk, no alcohol-related incidents have been reported for Saturday night, which demonstrates that the people of Royston are able to dance and drink alcohol without committing crime.

Hopefully, this will be taken into consideration the next time somebody tries to host a similar event, and may go someway to changing the negative and discriminative views of local authorities with regard to the people of the town.

Once again our apologies to those people that we let down.

Matt Gypps (on Behalf of Tri*Funk)

Old North Road

Royston