PURBECK council is the latest to question whether it can find enough room for gypsies and travellers.

Target estimates from the South West Regional Assembly suggest a total of 79 pitches - 44 permanent and 35 transit - need to be found on the Isle by 2011.

Already, the targets have angered local authorities across Dorset, who say there is no room to provide the number of places being proposed.

Purbeck council's response to the regional assembly's draft special strategy has now been published and it has voiced concern over the figures.

Purbeck councillor Mike Lovell, who also sits on the county council and regional assembly, said: "It is going to be very difficult.

"The problem is 85 per cent of Purbeck is covered by one designation or another.

"We recently had a group of travellers at Gallows Hill, between Bovington and Wool, and we thought it was quite a good site and would have applied for planning permission for the site.

"But we talked to Natural England and they said they would fight it as it is an area of outstanding natural beauty.

"So how are we going to produce these camps when so many of the sites we think are possibles are going to be near somewhere sensitive?"

A third of all the gypsy and traveller pitches suggested for the south west by 2011 are in Dorset, a notion branded "ridiculous" by Cllr Lovell.

The Purbeck council report notes that traveller communities in Dorset are always on the move between local authority areas.

It has therefore suggested a 50 per cent reduction in the targets to allow for such movements.

This would reduce Purbeck's target provision to 20 permanent and 17 transit sites, but still these figures are considered tough to achieve.

The Purbeck council report said: "Even the attainment of this level of provision, to meet the needs and aspirations of both the travelling community and local residents, will be difficult to accomplish, with regard to the practicalities of finding suitable locations in a highly developed and constrained area such as south-east Dorset."

Purbeck already houses a traveller site for around 20 people at Cold Harbour on the Bere Road.