News that plans to build 105,000 homes across the West of England have been rejected have been greeted with joy from residents and politicians.

Planning inspectors have advised the local authorities for Bristol, North Somerset, South Gloucestershire, and Bath and North East Somerset to take their joint spatial plan back to the drawing board.

The plans would have seen development in Thornbury, Charfield, Buckover, Yate and Coalpit Heath.

During the hearings, critics accused the four councils having predetermined ideas about where they wanted to put new housing and taking an inconsistent approach.

The councils told the hearing they had consulted extensively and were satisfied that their approach was consistent.

Campaign group TRAPP'D, Thornbury Residents Against Poorly Planned Development, discussed the decision in their latest newsletter.

They wrote: "This exactly reflects our observation that the existing proposals do not represent a spatial strategy, but merely a list of places where they’d like to build, which results in a random collection of satellite developments around Bristol."

Co-chairman of TRAPP'D, Colin Gardner has written to Toby Savage, the leader of South Gloucestershire Council, calling for an emergency debate.

He said: "The JSP has been found out by the Inspectors that the plan is no more than a list of 12 large development locations without any logical linking strategy, other than that these are the ones the four authorities happen to prefer.

"It is our opinion that there can be no recovery from such a damning conclusion."

Thornbury and Yate MP Luke Hall, who raised concerns about the JSP in Parliament, has written to the inspectors, recommending the withdrawal of Buckover Garden Village, alongside a root and branch review of Charfield, and Coalpit Heath as designations.

He said: “In my role as our constituency MP I have consistently and fiercely backed our communities in fighting these proposals at every step. Our campaign has been hard fought and testing for us all, from the huge community support and response to my surveys in 2016, taking the technical fight to the highest levels and successfully stopping support for Buckover – we kept faith and never relented.

"I am encouraged that inspectors have agreed with the case that I put forward in 2017 in my role as our local MP, that the plan as it stands has always been flawed. I am now urging them to hold firm in their preliminary view that changes must be made.”

South Gloucsestershire Lib Dem Leader, Claire Young, said: “This decision is a vindication for all of us who campaigned against this poorly thought through plan from the beginning.

"We have been making the case for over two years that South Gloucestershire’s Strategic Development Locations had not been properly thought through or chosen in a fair and reasoned way by the Conservative administration. "The Inspectors have clearly listened and agreed. It just goes to show that local campaigners can make a difference when we work together.”

Lib Dem spokesperson for Planning, Adrian Rush said: “It never should have got this far. The Inspectors wrote to South Gloucestershire and the other councils over a year ago to say that they had serious concerns about how the plan had been put together.”

Lib Dem deputy group leader, and chair of Thornbury Town Council's town development committee Maggie Tyrrell said: “It’s clear from the Inspectors’ damning remarks that the plan is so fundamentally flawed that it needs to go back to square one.

"The great risk now is that, without a viable local plan, communities will be swamped by more speculative development. We do need a local plan, but it must be one that distributes housing growth equitably and sustainably – not dumping the lion’s share of housing on just four or five communities.”