PLANS to spend possibly £5,000 on a 20 mph zone for a farm access and other narrow lanes around an Exmoor village were challenged this week.

Cutcombe Parish Council has agreed the proposals for Wheddon Cross and is being supported by Somerset County Council’s highways staff, who are designing the scheme.

Parish council chairman Cllr Jon Levenson said the idea was to extend an existing 20 mph speed limit past Cutcombe First School by a few hundred yards in each direction.

Cllr Levenson hoped the cost could be reduced by about £1,000 if funding could be secured from an Exmoor local community network of parishes set up by the county council.

He said the 20 mph plan pre-dated his election to the parish council last spring and had come about after 60 villagers presented a petition about two years ago.

Cllr Levenson said a public meeting took place after the petition at which ‘the vast majority of people’ were in favour of the plan.

The idea was then discussed at last year’s annual parish meeting when Cllr Levenson said ‘there were no dissenting voices’.

Cllr Levenson said: “The parish council decided we should take it forward and everybody had a chance to air their views.

“The whole notion was brought to us by the residents.

“The expense was fully approved in open meetings of the parish council over the last couple of years.

“The council’s minutes are in the public domain on the website.”

Cllr Levenson said there was as yet no date for when the plan would be implemented, but he expected it to happen in the next few months.

However, Cutcombe resident Robert Erskine this week challenged the wisdom of spending so much public money on lanes with so little traffic.

Mr Erskine said the plans included a half-mile farm track where traffic was discouraged by a sign reading: “Unsuitable for motor vehicles. Access to farm only.”

He said the county council carried out speed checks at an undisclosed location and recorded an average 22 mph, a level at which enforcement was unlikely.

The county had not disclosed its traffic count information, but Mr Erskine said there were no reported accidents and an exercise he carried out himself saw ‘a digger and a couple of vehicles come past’ in an hour.

Mr Erskine believed the parish council could instead look at other issues ‘in a rural Exmoor village, 1,000 feet above sea level, where elderly residents were trapped in their homes in recent snows for lack of gritting, and many residents have no mobile signal although within a mile of two major masts’.

As for public consultation on the proposals, Mr Erskine said: “I have not been consulted and people I have spoken to have not been consulted.”

He said it appeared the parish council did not keep a copy of the 60-name petition and so it was not available for public scrutiny.

Mr Erskine said nobody would object to protecting the school but he believed if a speed hump had been installed as it should have been when the original 20 mph zone was put in place then the new measures would not be necessary.

A county council spokesman was unable to comment on the highways authority’s involvement with the proposals in time for the Free Press.