Villagers have vowed to keep on fighting despite failing in their bid to get £110,000 funding for a CCTV scheme.

Storrington Parish Council had submitted a bid to the Home Office for the money for the three cameras after 2,000 residents backed the scheme.

But the Government Office for the South-East said there were areas with higher crime more deserving of funds.

Tony Read, chairman of the parish council, said: "We are very disappointed. To us this is a fairly major concept and really we are doing everything we can to raise the money.

"We do have trouble here, maybe not a great deal, but we have quite a lot of incidents of vandalism and we are trying to put the village in a better position to catch the offenders.

"We shall be doing everything we can to get cameras into Storrington and are trying to find alternative funding from private sources or businesses."

They are also looking at bidding for money under the community safety strategy, but that is still some way off.

Over the bank holiday weekend, thugs smashed windows in the village.

Ian Wadey, owner of Stable Antiques in West Street, said: "It's going to be a deterrent. We have had two or three windows smashed last weekend and if we had CCTV they might have been caught."

Charles Taylor, Labour candidate for the Arundel and South Downs seat in the General Election, has written to Home Secretary Jack Straw asking him to intervene with full or at least partial funding of the scheme.

The proposed locations for the cameras are in Storrington library car park, at Somerfield in Old Mill Square and outside Sussex Business Computers on High Street.