Dorset Greenspace Service

The Dorset Greenspace Service manages many of Dorset’s best countryside public assets. These include:

• Over 40 countryside sites, including two country parks, a National Nature Reserve, visitor centres, SSSIs and Green Flag award winning open space. These sites attract millions of visits a year from locals and visitors to Dorset. They are also used to offer improved health and wellbeing outcomes for the community and deliver hundreds of events each year
• Nearly 3,000 miles of Public Rights of Way, managing and improving countryside access on foot, horse and bike
• Long distance National Trails such as the Wessex Ridgeway and South West Coast Path, providing high quality trails for locals and visitors
• Nearly 5,000 miles of highway verge, maintained for highway safety, but also to enhance the landscape and environment for wildlife

In addition, the Greenspace Service manages the Gypsy and Traveller Service that operates four permanent traveller sites and helps manage the unauthorised encampments in Dorset.

The service is provided by teams local to their areas, ensuring greater connectivity with their communities and reducing travel time to get more work done on the ground. The teams have 14 apprentices each year, and also benefit from 15 volunteers each day; all enjoying superb training and career opportunities as well as helping to deliver enhanced services for the people of Dorset.

We aim not only to maintain Dorset’s green assets but also to improve them. The Service has been successful in winning millions of pounds of external capital investment to Dorset Greenspace. Many of the services we deliver are statutory, yet we recover a significant percentage of our operating costs from external sources each year. This approach reduces the overall cost to the Dorset tax payer.