Residents who are fighting a prospective monster housing development on the edge of Exmouth are urging the public to attend a vital information session.
The group known as Stop Exmo_20 – a reference to the formal planning reference for the possible application – will be gathering at the Masonic Hall on West Hill in Budleigh Salterton on Wednesday between 7pm and 8:30pm.
The site has been included in East Devon District Council’s draft local plan, a sprawling document that is identifying locations in the district where it would be deemed acceptable to build homes.
Even if the local plan is ratified with the Exmo_20 site in, developers would still need to submit planning applications, which could be refused if they failed to meet the council’s planning criteria.
However, one firm – 3West – has already started drawing up proposals for the Exmo_20 site.
In the draft local plan, around 700 homes are being suggested for the area near St John in the Wilderness Church. Earlier this year, an initial public consultation on the draft local plan saw 3,500 responses from residents who raised a range of concerns.
But more than 1,100 of those were against the St John’s scheme.
Campaigners behind Stop Exmo_20 have been persistently critical of the inclusion of the site in the draft local plan, because they claim it should not have progressed through an initial stage of the process.
They also believe that the prospective housing is too close to the internationally recognised Pebblebed Heaths. The mooted Exmo_20 site does include a 400-metre buffer zone whereby development would not be allowed, however, it is likely a road could dissect that area to connect it to an existing highway.
At the most recent strategic planning committee meeting, which is overseeing the local plan process, resident Nigel Humphries stated there were ”inconsistencies” surrounding the allocation of Exmo_20.
He also stated that a Freedom of Information request that looked at predictions by Devon County Council of forecast vehicle flows on the B3179 showed a potential daily increase of 2,500 per day.
Mr Humphrey said he thought the bulk of that would be from Exmo_20 given the B3179 would link to the site’s main access.
However, Ed Freeman, the council’s assistant director for planning strategy and development services, advised that a large number of allocations in the draft local plan had implications for air quality, and that officers were therefore considering the cumulative impacts of the overall strategy.
Further work would be carried out on potential mitigation measures, he added at the time.
The draft local plan is being created to identify areas of the district where houses could go to help meet its government-set housing targets.
The plan will stretch out to 2042. Local plans tend to last between 15-20 years and therefore include targets for large numbers of homes over that time.
Exmo_20 campaigners believe the proposed site isn’t needed for East Devon to meet the housing target set by government, however, the council has said it needs some headroom in case some of the sites it is pencilling in now don’t actually happen.
That headroom equated to around 2,000 homes in the latest official data to 1 April 2025.
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