Burford Town Council has vowed to "take all necessary steps" to have the decision to revoke the town's trial HGV ban overturned.

Oxfordshire County Council's cabinet member for travel and development strategy, Duncan Enright, revoked the experimental traffic regulation order for Burford at a meeting last Wednesday.

The next day Burford town councillors resolved for the issue to be called in for reconsideration by the county council's full cabinet.

Burford town councillor John White said: “There was a general feeling that we had been stitched up and a resolve to take all necessary steps to have the decision overturned."

Cllr Enright said criteria set by Oxfordshire county council at the start of the trial, to measure its success, had not been met.

It will end as scheduled on 5 February.

The county council will now look to introduce a countywide freight scheme.

Burford town council said the grounds for the appeal are that data from Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras was ignored.

Cllr White said: “This is extraordinary."

He said it was agreed with the county council that ANPR cameras should be placed at five strategic sites and that Burford Town Council should pay over £5,000 towards the cost.

“The data provided by those cameras are incontrovertible – you can see on screen what type of vehicles are passing the camera and when. And yet that data set, which is wholly supportive of our case and for which we have to pay in part, has been rejected out of hand by your officers. This cannot be right.”

Cllr White said the vastly improved air quality resulting from the weight limit had not been taken into consideration either.

“This is important to Burford as our primary school is only 25 metres from where the lorries queue to go over the bridge and Burford School Girls' Boarding House is right on the Lower High Street,” he said.

Burford Town Council raised £150,000 to cover the costs of the experimental traffic order, including a substantial contribution from Chipping Norton Town Council.

He said: “The donors made their contributions knowing that the TRO was experimental and that there was no guarantee that it would be continued or extended.

"But they were entitled to expect, and did expect, that the assessment of the success or failure of the Burford Weight Limit would be made in an even-handed manner, taking into account all the available data.

"That expectation will be dashed if the ANPR data set is ignored."

He added: “BTC continues to support the proposal to seek a regional solution but is not prepared to see the town rumbled to death in the five to 10 years it will take to put an enforceable regional solution in place.”

The measure to stop lorries weighing more than 7.5 tonnes driving through parts of Burford was introduced in August 2020.

Residents wanted the measure to continue but others in nearby towns and villages, including Witney, said they had been adversely affected by offset traffic while hauliers said it badly damaged their businesses.