PLANS for up to 30 homes on the edge of Bourton, which came with an offer of land for a new village hall has been turned down for the second time.

Residents said there was no need for the homes – off New Road or the plot of land for the hall with the extra properties only likely to further stretch local services.

One said that the land being offered for the new hall at Sandways Farm was boggy and likely to cost £900,000 to build; money which the village was unable to fund. The site is also outside the development boundary and considered to be ‘open countryside’ where building is not normally allowed.

The proposal for outline planning consent from T & A Land Ltd had been recommended for approval by council officers, subject to legal agreements about the land offer for the hall and an area of public open space.

Dorset Council’s northern area planning committee, meeting in Sturminster Newton on Tuesday, heard that more than a hundred had signed a petition against developing the plot with opposition also coming from the parish council.

Resident James Holmes told councillors that almost every school within ten miles of the village was over-subscribed, as was the GP surgery. He said building on the site would also affect the biodiversity, with newts and hedgehogs in the area, and argued that the access, on what he described as a blind bend onto New Road, was unsafe “with a history of near misses.”

Similar concerns were raised by another resident, Paul Curry, and the parish council chairman Cllr Cllr Peter Williams who said the village had already seen a 20per cent increase in housing over recent years.

He said the scheme was contrary to a series of planning policies and the Bourton Neighbourhood Plan which had been adopted following a majority public vote.

Other issues included only 5 or 6 ‘affordable homes’;  less than the recommended 40%, with even those in doubt as the site had been assessed to be only marginally viability by the District Valuer.

A 2019 scheme for the site had only suggested nine homes and a up to 30 homes, with the hall site, was turned down in March 2023 on similar grounds.

Agent for the developers, Matthew Williams, said that he believed the new proposal to be a great improvement over the scheme refused in the summer of 2023 and was critical of the claimed 109 objections, telling councillors than some were multiple, many from the same addresses and together only represented 10 per cent of the village population.

He said the proposal complied with the development plans for north Dorset “in a sympathetic way”.

Proposing rejection Cllr Val Pothecary said the plans flew in the face of many local and national planning policies, including the Neighbourhood Plan, and said that while the developers might have spoken to council officers she found no evidence of any engagement at all with the parish council or residents, many of which seemed unconvinced by the changes since the summer of 2023.