The award-winning magazine set up to help homeless people has banned some of its growing number of eastern European vendors amid concerns over aggressive selling.

The individuals, including at least one extended family, were said to have broken the Big Issue's own standards of behaviour.

Romanians and Roma gypsies have taken over many of the Big Issue's most lucrative vending pitches across the central belt of Scotland in recent weeks.

The magazine itself yesterday said it had around 60-70 Romanian vendors, most of them concentrated in Glasgow, where traditional homeless Scots vendors are now rarely seen.

The ground-breaking publication has up to 600 people "badged" as vendors in Scotland, but only 350 are on the streets across the country at any given time. That would mean that as many as one in five of its active sellers are Romanian.

The magazine's Scottish distribution manager, Michael Luby, yesterday confirmed some sellers have now been stripped of their badges.

He said: "We have a strict code of conduct. If they come over and don't abide by that code of conduct then we take their badges off them. We are open and honest and work closely with the police."

However, Mr Luby defended the magazine's decision to recruit large numbers of Romanian vendors, many of whom are part of families able to pool resources and with access to cars and enough money to buy thousands of copies of the Big Issue in advance.

He said: "We have no choice but to badge them up. They meet the criteria for being homeless. We don't discriminate against people on the grounds of colour, creed, religion or sex.

"These Romanians and Roma come over here and think it is a land of milk and honey and they end up homeless. We have been left to pick up the pieces on this."

Some of the Roma vendors - usually middle-aged women in headscarves - have been seen clutching babies or surrounded by young children, a classic begging tactic already widely adopted in the south of England and continental Europe.

Romanians, including members of the country's large Roma gypsy minority, have had limited rights to work and live in the United Kingdom since New Year. Many have arrived via Ireland and are driving cars with Irish plates. Mr Luby said Romanians had first approached Big Issue at its Oxford Street headquarters a "few months" ago.

There are now Big Issue vendors from several other eastern European countries, including Poland and the Czechi Republic.

They, however, like most sellers from Scotland or the rest of the United Kingdom are individuals who have fallen on hard times, perhaps through unemployment or drug or alcohol abuse, and can only afford to buy a small quantity of magazines at a time.

Several of the traditional individual vendors have complained to customers that they are being squeezed out by better-organised Romanians.

Mr Luby, however, said none had attended a special meeting organised by Big Issue to address these concerns.

He said: "No-one has been forced out of their pitch. But if somebody owns a sweet shop and somebody else opens up a sweet shop down the road they would not be very happy."