Plans to force Watford Borough Council to provide an additional ten traveller pitches by 2011 are “bonkers”, councillors have agreed.

An assessment by the East of England Regional Assembly (EERA) originally found that Watford should only have to provide an additional four pitches, due to being a densely populated town.

A pitch is defined as an area of land that may contain a building, parking space or one or more caravans, as opposed to a site, which accommodates several pitches.

However, the EERA's planning panel ruled that regardless of size, demand or capacity, all districts in the region should provide a minimum of 15.

For Watford, this was reduced to ten after an independent planning inquiry, and the council discussed the issue at Cabinet on Tuesday before responding to a Government Office of the East of England (GO-East) consultation.

Councillor Iain Sharpe, planning portfolio holder, said: “What it comes down to is Watford really has very little demand for additional gipsy sites and very little capacity. We risk being forced to allocate sites nobody wants just so we can tick a particular box but trigger a lot of anxiety, or we risk not complying. We do have to make our case forcefully.

”What we're being asked to do is find an inappropriate site that will probably not be developed because there's no demand for it.”

Councillor Andrew Mortimer said: “Iain has expressed it in a way most of us would agree. We should enthusiastically keep on at the EERA to apply common sense.”

Councillor Andy Wylie added: “Gipsy provision should be on the basis of need of the gipsy community where they work and circulate. They're being shared out across the region irrespective of need. Now we have to provide somewhere for them to be where they don't want to be and that is bonkers.

“We want gipsy families to be where they want to be. At our gipsy site at Tolpits Lane (which has ten pitches) there's no trouble with that site at all. It's well managed and liked by the gipsy community. However, that's not to say the council have an extra umpteen sites because someone else in the East of England wants to avoid having gipsy sites in that area.”