WEST Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger has praised residents for successfully challenging a road closure which could have wiped thousands off Bank holiday weekend takings for businesses in the Dulverton area.

Somerset Council had agreed to shut the junction of the A396 and B3222 in the Exe Valley on Saturday (May 25) to allow BT to carry out works.

But the news caused uproar, with locals pointing out the closure would effectively isolate Exebridge, Brushford, and Dulverton on what was expected to be the busiest day of the long weekend break.

Furious locals together with a Devon councillor complained the closure had been approved without any consultation and the council relented with 24 hours to spare.

Among the events that would have suffered was Saturday morning’s Dulverton Farmers Market followed by a new ‘Dulverton Sounds’ Music Festival.

Mr Liddell-Grainger, who is the Conservative candidate in the new Tiverton and Minehead constituency, said the decision to allow BT on site over the holiday weekend had at best been ‘ill thought-out’.

He said: “I presume there are calendars at County Hall as there are elsewhere and that they are clearly marked up to show this was a Bank holiday weekend, one of the busiest of the year for the hospitality sector.

“I cannot imagine there was any degree of urgency attached to the work BT was planning to carry out and therefore it would have been entirely possible to delay it until a less busy time.

“But yet again we witnessed this attitude that ‘it’s only West Somerset so it does not matter’, precisely the same policy that was adopted when the council inflicted months of traffic chaos when installing a cyclepath between Minehead and Dunster.

“Sadly, the more centralised Somerset’s administration had become, the crasser the decisions that are being made, and this is precisely what I and others warned would happen when we campaigned against the creation of a unitary authority.

“I am grateful for the traders and others in the Dulverton area for the clamour they raised over this issue, and even more grateful for Devon County Council’s intervention.”