A Derbyshire council is planning on seizing land from another local authority to create a permanent site which Traveller and Gypsy families can call home.

Over the past 14 years, Derbyshire Dales District Council, through leadership by the Conservatives and jointly by Liberal Democrats, Green Party and Labour, has failed to allocate a single permanent Traveller site for a homeless family, due to its inability to agree a plot which is “publicly and politically acceptable”.

The broader failure to allocate a permanent site has stretched on for 40 years, officials say, branding this too a “failure”.

Politicians of all different colours of rosettes have debated plans for permanent and temporary sites across the entire council’s landholdings, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds assessing private land ownership, routinely checking auctions, inspecting plots owned by other Government and council bodies – ruling out hundreds of available sites.

The potential plot in Watery Lane, Ashbourne.

placeholder image — The potential plot in Watery Lane, Ashbourne.

The Dales has been in Conservative control for much of its 50 year history, but has been run by a Lib-Dem led alliance since 2023, with combined leadership from Lib Dems, Greens, Labour and a non-alligned councillor.

Throughout the past 14 years, numerous senior council officials have come and gone without managing to adopt a permanent plot and with frustrations often coming to boil in public meetings over that issue, and finding temporary solutions with options and direction frequently requested, investigated, brought to the table and rejected, on repeat.

This has all resulted in leaving now two homeless Gypsy and Traveller families (each identifying as different ethnicities) without a place to call home, breaching legal homelessness duties that to date have not been enforced.

That situation has led to recurring unauthorised sites being used by the relevant two families, with the regular shortlist of temporary sites now firmly opposed in being revisited by residents and politicians after years of “temporary” use.

The potential plot in Watery Lane, Ashbourne, circled in red.

The council currently finds itself chasing a long-held aim for a permanent plot in Ashbourne, while having temporary planning permission for a site in the Matlock railway station car park, having rejected its own plans for a plot in Rowsley and paused works into temporary plots in Matlock Bath and Middleton by Wirksworth.

The latest twist in the tail is the district council being on the verge of starting compulsory purchase procedures, to seize land by legal force from Derbyshire County Council to develop a permanent site in Watery Lane, Ashbourne, close to the tip, cemetery, allotments and sewage works.

This comes two weeks after the district council submitted an application to itself to temporarily accommodate a homeless Traveller family on its own depot, the opposite side of the tip, for up to two years.

Meanwhile, the district and county councils are set to be scrapped and merged by April 2028 through local government reorganisation.

Travellers have been housed on a temporary site on the Matlock railway station car park. Image from Eddie Bisknell.

In 2015, the Dales had approved plans for a permanent Gypsy and Traveller site in Watery Lane, with entry 60 metres to the west of Ashbourne’s waste and recycling tip and 150 metres west of the district’s depot site.

It ticked all the boxes for at the time the one affected homeless family and continues to do so, they have shared, due to vicinity to family and health services.

In 2016, the district had agreed in principle to lease the plot from the then Labour-controlled Derbyshire County Council for 25 years, with £10,000 set aside to design the plans and invite tenders.

However, with the deal in the final stages, the county council changed hands in May 2017 to the Conservatives, who ceased talks due to investigations into long-held plans for an Ashbourne bypass, which may require the land in question.

That pause on the land continued throughout the Conservatives two terms at County Hall despite numerous approaches from the district under both fellow Tories and opposition parties.

Reform UK took control at County Hall last May and the district made a fresh approach to see if it could lease the Watery Lane land it had been on the verge of leasing in 2017.

Despite the change in political control, including an Ashbourne county councillor being the authority’s chairman, the authority said it is “not in a position to offer up” the plot “as it is required to meet their own (unstated) strategic plans” which they do not see changing “in the foreseeable future”.

Two months earlier, in September 2025, a county council meeting heard that the Ashbourne bypass plans had been paused indefinitely due to funding issues, with focus to shift into other bypass options elsewhere in the county, including Glapwell, near Shirebrook.

In December, an email from Reform’s county council chairman Nick Adams, who represents Dovedale and Ashbourne North, was read out at a district council meeting, saying the use of a derelict part of the opposite tip would be supported as a temporary measure.

The relevant plot is set to be reallocated in the district’s plan for future housing up to 2040, a report details, with officials saying it remains the “most appropriate” site in the Dales and Paul Wilson, chief executive, previously said it was the only permanent plot being “actively pursued”.

The council has already set aside half a million pounds to find and develop a permanent Traveller site and now wants to set more money aside to potentially seize the Watery Lane plot from the county council, two years before the two are due to be scrapped and merged.

A compulsory purchase plan would cost up to £25,000, the district council says, with senior officials also able to spend up to £50,000 extra if required.