A councillor has warned Southend seafront could be cut off from the rest of the town under plans to build a new multi-million-pound cinema and leisure development.

The plan to redevelop the Seaway car park into a £50million leisure complex has been engulfed in controversy since changes were made to the initial plans and developer Turnstone failed to meet a deadline of obtaining planning permission by December last year.

While councillors voted to extend that deadline in February, giving Turnstone “one last chance” to get planning permission by January 2020, Independent councillor Martin Terry has said questions need to be answered about how the development will be beneficial for the town.

He said: “The way Southend envisaged this was to link the seafront and the high street together using Spanish steps but that part of the scheme fell apart and so I have questions about the design.

“This was supposed to make Southend an all-weather destination but by disconnecting the seafront that is no longer the case.

“It will cause a divide and the only logical way for people to access the leisure complex from the seafront would be to walk up Pier Hill and round the back of the Palace Hotel, it is a difficult route and it will have a vast effect.

“With the way the seafront is laid out, the arcades will act like a Berlin Wall between the two and it won’t work. Those Spanish steps were recognised as a fundamental part of the scheme and I need to understand how it will now work.

He also highlighted concerns about the number of parking spaces as there are expected to be more than 100 fewer than what is currently available.

A number of councillors who are part of Southend's coalition administration voted in favour of extending the Seaway contract in February but Mr Terry did not.

He stressed he may be part of the administration but he is also an independent councillor working on behalf of the town.

"I won’t put my name to something that could be detrimental to the town," he added.

Tim Deacon, director of Turnstone, said: “The Spanish steps idea was introduced as an aspiration. We did explore it and took quite lengthy steps to explore how we could do it and at one point we had the option to procure one of the properties we would need.

“However, when we looked at the technical aspects of creating the Spanish steps it was going to cost many, many millions of pounds.”

The company has a contractual obligation to provide a minimum of 542 parking spaces and in a planning application submitted to the council in September, they proposed 555.

Members of Southend’s Conservative group, who oversaw negotiations of the contract, have been urging the council to ask Turnstone to increase the number of spaces but Councillor Ian Gilbert has insisted that the council would be violating terms of their contract if they were to demand more.

Turnstone has promised the development will boost the local economy by £15million per year and provide up to 500 new jobs.

The plans are expected to be discussed by the development committee sometime before Christmas.