The battle over plans to redevelop the Seaway Car Park into a major new leisure development is set to continue as the Conservatives urge the council to officially end a contract the developer.

Controversy over the proposed £50million leisure centre has been raging for a number of years due to a debate over the loss of parking spaces - under current plans spaces will be slashed from 661 to just 555.

The issue became the primary reason that councillors refused to grant planning permission to the scheme last month, choosing instead to defer the plans so that developer Turnstone could try to address the parking issue.

But before any further consideration of the plans can take place, council bosses need to decide on whether to extend a contract to allow Turnstone to build on the Lucy Road car park.

It expired two days after the deferral decision.

Southend’s Conservative Party is now urging the council not to extend in a motion tabled ahead of a full council meeting next week.

The motion highlights that both council leader Ian Gilbert and deputy leader Councillor Ron Woodley said during a meeting last year that the developer would not get an extension if they failed to have planning permission by the contract’s end date of January 17, 2020.

The Tory councillors say that the contract should not be extended and instead the council should go out to tender to find a new developer.

When a new developer is awarded the contract, they should be required to provide “significantly more car park spaces”.

Conservative Councillor Kevin Buck, who submitted the motion with Tory leader Tony Cox, said: “There seems to be a lot of questions that have remained unanswered about this, primarily of which has been Turnstone initially offering upwards of 700 parking spaces but we have ended up 555.

“No one has explained how they negotiated down.

“I am not opposed in principal to this scheme but the issue has always been around car parking spaces. When you consider the Festival Leisure development in Basildon, it is similar to Seaway in terms of design but it has 2,000 parking spaces. This would only have had 555.”

He added that Turnstone has had “long enough” to deliver a viable plan and it is in the public interest to “send it back to tender and renegotiate”.

The council’s deputy leader Councillor Ron Woodley has warned that Turnstone is appealing the deferral decision to the planning inspectorate and the council cannot end the contract until a decision is made by the secretary of state.

The motion will be discussed on Thursday night.