PLANS to give a west Wirral resort its own version of Liverpool’s award-winning Hope Street Hotel, as part of a £10m scheme to breathe new life into the seaside town, are to be dramatically halved in size.

The flagship project, centred on a controversial luxury hotel overlooking West Kirby’s marine lake, is expected to be significantly scaled back and developers given extra time to work on their scheme. The Daily Post understands that a confidential report to go to Wirral’s cabinet next week says the luxury hotel will be reduced from 80 to 40 bedrooms and recommends developers Carpenter Investments be given an extra three months to revise the scheme. It centres around the hotel at the head of the Marine Lake, on the Dee Lane car park site, and include a restaurant, bar, spa and conference facilities, together with retail outlets at ground-floor level.

A new sailing school building will be on the footprint of the existing site, and will include an information centre for Hilbre Island, a separate boat storage building, and additional retail unit and café.

The developers said they aimed to integrate all the sites into a single waterfront attraction, which would create around 50 new jobs.

Last night, Alan Beer of the development company behind the scheme, said they had revised their plans “in light of the consultation exercise”.

Mr Beer said: “We have made some revisions, that was the whole point of the consultation exercise. We have carried out a very extensive consultation exercise, spoken to hundreds of people and distributed thousands of leaflets and we have really listened to what people are saying.