A CONTROVERSIAL plan to build a shop and cafe targeting tourists beside the A30 at the Whiddon Down junction has been rejected.

West Devon Borough Council’s planning officers had recommended that councillors approve the plans for the shop, cafe and supporting secondary areas including storage, toilets, offices and kitchen space — but when it was brought before the council’s development management and licensing committee on Tuesday, eight of the ten councillors on the committee voted to refuse the plans.

Councillors rejected the plans for the shop, which would have been located on agricultural land immediately to the north of the A30 junction, saying that the proposal was ‘for unrestricted retail use on a site in open countryside unrelated to a settlement and to an existing horticultural and agricultural business.

‘By virtue of its size, location and range of goods, it has potential to harm existing villages by diversion of trade.

‘The applicant has not shown an absence of harm through a retail impact assessment.’

There were also concerns over the impact on the habitat of dormice, a protected species that is known to nest in the hedgerows along the site, and on nearby Thornberry Farm, a Grade II listed farmhouse to the north of the site.

Read the full story in today’s edition of the Okehampton Times.