Convicted Budleigh Salterton paedophile, Tommy Dance, will next month plead for his jail sentence to be reduced.

Adrian Dance, known locally as Tommy, of Queens Road, will request a reduction of his 21-and-a-half-year sentence for a string of rape and sexual offences against underage girls, at the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, on Tuesday, October 11.

Married Dance, who previously lived at Pines Road, Exmouth, is not expected to appear in court.

Detective Constable Mike Chalmers, at Exmouth CID, said: “The appeal is against the sentence and part of the conviction.”

In 2010, a previous application by Dance to reduce his jail sentence was withdrawn because of legal issues.

At the time, a point of law had to be examined and established before the new appeal date could be set.

Dance was jailed in August 2010.

He pleaded guilty to raping an underage girl, indecently assaulting two girls, committing acts of gross indecency with children and indecently touching an underage girl.

Detective Constable Chalmers said the police continued to support Dance’s victims.

The court heard how Dance silenced his young victims by threatening to kill them if they shopped him to the police.

The bench was told how the paedophile, then 54, used a mixture of fear, threat, violence and manipulation to rape and sexually abuse young girls.

He preyed on young girls over three decades – repeatedly raping a girl in the 1980s and subjecting four others to a series of horrific and sordid sex crimes – including the abduction and rape of a 14-year-old.

When passing a 21-and-a-half-year sentence down to Dance, Judge Graham Cottle told the paedophile at Exeter Crown Court he had committed a ‘gross breach of trust’ against children’.