Despite last-minute offers the plan to build more than 100 houses on the outskirts of Ottery was unanimously rejected by the district council.

Dozens of residents packed last week’s ‘Development Management’ committee meeting at Knowle to hear an agent for Strategic Land Partnerships make a string of offers to help try and get the application for 120 homes in Feniton approved.

But despite the council officers dropping several of its reasons for recommending refusal in light of the pledges of cash for a new school and 40 per cent affordable housing, the committee members were strongly against the proposal for the land west of Ottery Road.

Ottery Town Council had already slammed the proposals, claiming if the plan went ahead it would put extra strain on health, education and other services in the town.

Between 30 and 40 of the homes would have been in Ottery’s parish, but residents of all 120 homes would use services such as the already overstretched Coleridge Medical Centre.

The housing plan had generated almost 300 objections and a campaign, ‘Fight For Feniton’s Future’, was mobilised to protest against development in the village.

But at the East Devon District Council meeting they got what they wanted, as the committee rejected the application on the grounds it was in ‘an unallocated site in the open countryside’, it would mean the loss of high-grade agricultural land and an attractive green-field site.