The green fields of Oxfordshire today looked like being saved from an army of bulldozers after plans for more than 53,000 new homes were rejected, writes Mark Templeton.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's controversial scheme fell at the first hurdle when councillors threw out the huge house-building programme. They voted in favour of a Tory proposal to keep to an original target of 33,000 new homes a year in the South East for the next five years.

The decision came after a tense two-hour meeting of the South East Regional Planning Authority Serplan in London. Conservatives argued that Mr Prescott's move to allow 43,000 new properties every year 2,680 in Oxfordshire for the next five years in the South East would harm the environment and there was insufficient cash to pay for vital infrastructure, roads and schools.

The government originally suggested more than 75,000 homes should be built in the county but later reduced the figure to 53,000. Shadow environment minister Archie Norman also backed the county council over fears valuable green land would be lost for ever.

He said: "The real challenge is to convert existing accommodation in our towns and cities to make it suitable for single and elderly people, not to be building on green fields. "The truth is that John Prescott is forcing local authorities in Oxfordshire to build the wrong houses in the wrong places against the wishes of the people in the area.

"Isn't this truly the end of the Labour claim to be the greenest Government ever?" County councillor Douglas Spencer, who represents Bicester North, one of the areas likely to be hardest hit by the new homes, said: "This will certainly give us far more confidence when we come to consider the draft plan and many of us councillors feel we will be making a stand against the additional housing."

Serplan had said that no more than 33,400 homes could be built annually between 1996 and 2016 without wrecking green fields. A spokesman for the Tory group on the Local Government Association said: We are obviously delighted with this result. It is backed not just by rural people but by the whole population in the South East.

However, Labour councillors accused the Tories of breathtaking hypocrisy on the issue, adding that it was former Tory Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley who ruined green fields with the house building boom of the 1980s. Lord Hanningfield, Tory group leader at the Local Government Association, said: "House-building on the scale proposed by the Government would mean vast tracts of green land being lost forever as an army of bulldozers swept across the south east."

Mr Prescott will make a final decision in the autumn.