IT'S a dream house in beautiful Hampshire countryside where most city dwellers would love to live.

Ken and Jacky Duffy left London in 1997 to build their ideal £750,000 family home in the picturesque New Forest.

But now the couple have been ordered by the government to reduce the four-bedroom house to a pile of rubble.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott ruled that the Duffys have three years to tear down their home at Ossemsley, near New Milton.

The landmark intervention marks the end of a long-running legal battle which threatened to turn Britain's rural planning laws on their head, and open the floodgates to a wave of unauthorised developments in the countryside. New Forest District Council slapped an enforcement notice on the two-storey Lakeside, in North Drive, in 2000 after claiming Mr Duffy had gone well beyond the permission for a bungalow originally granted there.

Mr Duffy lost most of his planning arguments at the subsequent public inquiry, but he and wife Jacky were handed victory because the order would have violated their European human rights, by making them homeless.

Council planners, fearful the ruling would set a precedent which could wreck green belt areas, persuaded High Court judges to order a rare second appeal hearing, which took place in Lymington last summer.

In findings just published by inspector Andrew Kirby, said Mr Duffy had shown little evidence of laying the groundwork for his long-touted free range chicken enterprise, needed to provide an agricultural justification for the house.

He said that suitable alternative accommodation for the family was available in the area, and added that if Mr Duffy had followed the correct planning procedures laid down by the council, any penalties of over-development would have been much less severe.

"At most he would have had to sell the house at its reduced valuation, rather than demolish it," said Mr Kirby.

"In doing what he did, Mr Duffy was certainly misguided and, in the light of the clear advice given to him, his actions verge on the pig-headed and foolhardy."

But Mr Kirby's view that tearing the house down was an excessive response, was not shared by Mr Prescott.

Acknowledging the "particularly unusual issues" involved, he instead made the "exceptional" decision to grant a temporary permission for three more years - after which it must go.

Both Mr Duffy and the district council declined to comment while they seek legal advice over the ruling.