Fears for town's elderly

Campaigners in a Derbyshire town are leading a protest for the area to be provided with a residential care centre.

The Wirksworth Care Centre Group and a not-for-profit housing association wanted to buy the disused former maternity hospital.

The plan was to convert the building into flats for elderly people.

But the building, owned by the Mental Health Trust, has just been sold subject to contract to a private bidder.

Lifelong residents

Fran Childs, chair of the Care Centre Group, feels elderly people are being forced out of the town.

She said: "The older people when they get too frail to live in their houses have to go miles away to Ashbourne, which is one and a half hours away on the bus, and various other places miles away.

"This means their friends cannot visit them, their families have lost them and the town loses them.

"People who have lived all their lives in Wirksworth can no longer stay in the place they know."