Travellers at railway station facing eviction

TRAVELLERS who have moved on to a railway station car park are set to be evicted, despite lockdown restrictions.

There are around a dozen caravans on the Matlock Station car park, and have been for several months.

Some, a family which has expressed a wish to settle in Ashbourne and for whom the council has a legal homelessness duty, will be allowed to stay but others are set to be evicted.

During the first lockdown, Derbyshire Dales District Council said that travellers, then staying on land near the Agricultural Business Centre in Bakewell, would not be moved until restrictions were lifted.

It said government advice was to “tolerate” and “support” them to avoid moving people during a period of travel restrictions and avoid potentially spreading the virus.

In September, the district council agreed to assign a site in Knabhall Lane, Tansley, near Matlock, as both a temporary and permanent home for travellers.

It has not had a permanent site in the district for decades, a failure it has frequently and readily owned up to.

The Tansley site was said to be the solution to the issue, particularly for one traveller family to which the council has a legal duty to find a home - due to them formally registering as homeless.

However, a council spokesperson said this week: “Those travellers on site to whom the council owes a homelessness duty will not be evicted, as we currently have nowhere to move them, other than the Tansley site, which is not ready.

“There are a number of other travellers on site and if the court grants us an order then we will be evicting these travellers.

“This group has already been served with a direction to leave the site.”

In September, Tim Braund, the council’s director of regulatory services, said the Tansley site “would need considerable work to fit nine pitches (the number the council must designate) on it” but hinted that it may only fit six, the number the authority aims to secure before the end of the year. During the same meeting, councillors raised serious concerns about the suitability of the Tansley site.

It does not have access to clean water or electricity, which the council would have to provide temporary and permanent connections to at an unknown cost to the taxpayer.

The traveller family to which the council has a legal obligation are said to have concerns about the “remoteness” of the Tansley site, which sits at 800 feet above sea level, and have said it is not their preferred geographic location.

They have said they would like to settle in “the south of the Derbyshire Dales.”