WINCHESTER civic chiefs have again come under fire from a former rebel councillor over the redevelopment of Silver Hill.

Kim Gottlieb's legal action in 2016 scuppered the first redevelopment and he fears the council is again heading in the "wrong direction".

He raised his concerns at the city council scrutiny committee which gave feedback to the Cabinet, next week set to approve the business case for the new scheme.

Mr Gottlieb told councillors: "I’ve been campaigning on Silver Hill for ten years, and I fear that I’ll be here for another ten years, because after decades of disappointment the project is still heading in the wrong direction and the strategy proposed for its development will not lead to success.

"The key to successful development is to make a complicated process as simple as it can be. In this case, it’s also essential to create effective competition so that you attract the best and brightest and most imaginative ideas from as many developers as possible. The proposed strategy fails in both respects. It is far, far too complicated and narrow-minded, and it will fail to generate effective competition.

"Please imagine, if you will, that you and Cabinet are acting as judges on Bake Off or Strictly. But instead of going through a simple process of judging the contestants’ cooking and dancing, all your time and energy is spent reading their history; considering how good they look and how well they write essays.

"The winner will be chosen before you have ever tasted their food or watched them dance. This gives the winner, in practice, total control over what happens next and there will be little the Council can do, however mediocre the Bakewell tart or Foxtrot is. By the time doubts set in, the Council will have spent more years and more millions and it won’t want to change course. That is why it extended the contract with Henderson from an original five years to more than eleven."

Mr Gottlieb, himself a property developer, argues that many developers will be put off not least by the issue of the site's archaeology. The council has not committed to a major excavation such as with the nearby Brooks Centre in the late 1980s.

The scrutiny committee was looking at the business case for the scheme and making recommendations to Cabinet which will consider it on Wednesday, December 15.

The City of Winchester Trust also has concerns. Richard Baker said a masterplan needed to be developed to properly guide the development. New ideas were emerging ad hoc such as a hotel.

The council is proposing to have a single development partner across the whole site, between Friarsgate and The Broadway, which is now largely owned by the city council.

Veryan Lyons, head of programme at the council, said the business case indicated the development would "have a long-lasting positive impact on the economy of Winchester."

Conservative group leader Cllr Caroline Horrill said: "If we don't have a masterplan so we don't know what is going to be built, how can we have confidence in or better understand the business of calculations here, given we still have essentially a blank sheet of paper?"

Scrutiny committee chairman Cllr Caroline Brook urged the Cabinet to follow the Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) drawn up after extensive public consultation which aims for a mix of housing, retail and cultural attractions.