CIVIC chiefs have resisted calls to delay a decision which could dramatically alter the future of Winchester city centre.

The city council will rule on the Silver Hill development next week despite a looming legal battle over the controversial scheme.

Campaigners today urged cabinet to postpone the meeting until after the results of a High Court hearing next month.

Tory councillor Kim Gottlieb is taking his own administration to judicial review to argue that it unlawfully allowed developer Henderson to propose dropping affordable housing and a bus station without allowing other firms to bid on the scheme.

Former city councillor Karen Barratt said the council was putting its planning committee in an “impossible position” by forcing it to decide on a project which will later be challenged in the High Court.

“Saying [there has been] indecent haste with Silver Hill, given the number of years it has gone on, doesn’t sound right,” she told cabinet, “but I think in this case ... it would be prudent to delay that meeting until after the judicial review.

“It’s going to create all sorts of complications and I regret to say, having been on the march on Saturday, that the general opinion in the community is that it is a done deal.”

More than a thousand people joined Winchester’s biggest public demonstration in decades on Saturday to denounce councillors who they say are charging ahead with major developments like Silver Hill without listening to public views.

City council leader Cllr Rob Humby told cabinet he had taken legal advice which confirmed the planning meeting could go ahead because it will tackle a “completely different” issue to Cllr Gottlieb’s High Court challenge over procurement.

He said: "The applicant has every right to have their application heard in a timely fashion, the same as any other.

“If we had a situation where anybody looked at a planning application they didn’t agree with – and we had a protest, a march or anything else – and I was then asked to call it in, where would it stop? Where would we be?”

Planning chiefs will decide on the controversial amendments at a special meeting on Thursday, December 11.

If approved, the long-touted Silver Hill scheme will lie in wait until the High Court hearing, which is expected to take place over two days in January.