A war of words has broken out between two Derbyshire councils over a planned temporary Traveller site in a Peak District village.
Cllr Carolyn Renwick, Derbyshire County Council’s cabinet member for infrastructure and environment has hit out at the earmarking of the Old Station Close car park in Rowsley as a temporary Traveller site.
Derbyshire Dales District Council made the controversial decision on December 9, at the county council’s own headquarters, against the advice of the county council and hundreds of residents and businesses.
It said the site would have “temporary tolerated” status for two specific homeless Traveller and Gypsy families for which it is legally obligated to accommodate, from March 1 to October 31 each year.
The district council has been on the hunt for permanent and temporary Traveller sites for decades, without success, and has detailed its own “failures” in its obligations to the two specific families for which it has had a legal obligation – for five years.
In 2015, it had approved plans for a permanent site in Watery Lane, Ashbourne, on a former Nestle site owned by the county council.
The district council successfully added the site to its Local Plan in 2017.
However, the county council, following the Conservatives taking control of the authority in May 2017, refused to hand over the plot to the district council due to ongoing wishes to build an Ashbourne Bypass, which has yet to see a shovel go in the ground seven years later.
Cllr Renwick, who was appointed to the authority in 2021, the second term of the county Conservative administration, said: “I was surprised and dismayed by the decision the district council took last week to turn their car park at Rowsley into a temporary Travellers site.
“It is well used by local people and visitors, and also means that people travelling from the north do not have to travel into Matlock to park to enjoy this trail.
“I just do not think this is the right place to offer as a travellers site and we call on the district council to have another look at their plans.
“We’ve been working hard to make the White Peak Loop a real attraction for walking, cycling and horse riding, with new sections about to be opened so that people can get from Matlock to Buxton, then across to the High Peak Trail and back to Matlock. This decision does not help our ambitions for this at all.”
A “strong” objection from the county council had been submitted to the district ahead of the meeting at which it made its decision regarding Rowsley, opposing all of the six sites considered for temporary tolerated plots, including those in Matlock, Matlock Bath, Wirksworth and Middleton by Wirksworth.
It says it is concerned that its opposition to the sites was not reflected or taken account of during the consideration of the sites in a report prepared for the meeting, and that councillors making the decision would be uninformed as a result.
In response to Cllr Renwick, a district council spokesperson said: “To put the county council’s claims about access to the White Peak Loop into context, the car park at Rowsley, when empty, has 29 spaces.
“Rowsley, along with the other three potential temporary sites that won approval at a full meeting of the district council last week, will now go through a statutory planning process, during which the county council will be a consultee.
“However, it is worth noting that the key reason the district council has been hamstrung in recent years in providing Traveller sites to two families to whom we owe a legal obligation was the current county administration’s decision to withdraw an approved site in its ownership in Watery Lane, Ashbourne, which was – and still is – embedded in our Local Plan.
“With that in mind, we would recommend that the county council, and Cllr Renwick in particular, respect the democratic process and our Progressive Alliance’s ongoing determination to identify both permanent and temporary Traveller sites in the Derbyshire Dales, thus redressing the failure of previous Conservative administrations to effectively tackle this challenge.”
