Campaigners voiced their anger tonight after county councillors rejected calls for a further investigation into any potential health risks of building a £100m incinerator in Oxfordshire.

Villagers living close to Sutton Courtenay, near Abingdon, and Ardley, near Bicester – the two sites proposed for a waste burner – descended on County Hall to fight for a further assessment of safety fears.

The incinerator would burn 300,000 tonnes a year of the county’s waste.

Members of Sutton Courtenay Against the Incinerator and Ardley Against Incinerator called for another study to consider whether plans to burn mixed waste could effectively create a “landfill in the sky” by releasing harmful dioxins into the atmosphere.

Patrick Woodrow, 37, from Bucknell, said: “There is a health debate and there shouldn’t be one. The health arguments for incineration should be so robust it should be impossible to challenge them, but the debate is still raging.

“The Health Protection Agency has failed utterly to allay public concern.

“Don’t trust the Health Protection Agency just because it is the Health Protection Agency. As with Thalidomide and DDT, the official line can sometimes be wrong.

“There is no evidence to support the theory modern UK incinerators are safe. None whatsoever.”

The council is under pressure to find an alternative to tipping waste into landfill sites to avoid multi-million-pound Government fines.

However, campaigners claim the council has not properly considered alternative methods to deal with waste, such as anaerobic digestion, and believe the health implications of an incinerator have not been fully investigated.

More than 5,000 people signed a petition to oppose an incinerator in Sutton Courtenay, with a further 2,000 people adding their names to an Ardley protest petition.

County Hall’s Conservative administration rejected calls for a further investigation and insisted reports from statutory bodies would be sufficient to determine whether there were any health risks.

Council leader Keith Mitchell said: “It is quite clear the Environment Agency and Health Protection Agency are the appropriate legal organisations to carry out independent assessments.

“They have carried out that task on all of the proposals for incinerators that have been made over the years in Britain. We will rely on their expertise in these matters."

Oxford GP Dr Angela Jones, who lives in Sutton Courtenay, 49, said: “This is disappointing news. The kind of independent investigation we wanted should have happened four years ago when the procurement process began, so local residents wouldn’t have to face a rearguard action to prevent this incinerator from being built.

“The whole effect of air pollution on health is very poorly understood and poorly researched.

“A lot of the health problems which we see nowadays, such as heart disease and strokes, can be related to air pollution.

“This isn’t about scaremongering. We feel someone else should go to the effort of evaluating the health risk, whether or not it proves it either way.”