AGREEMENT needs to be reached this year on a new conference and music venue to replace the Brighton Centre so that it it does not get delayed for another decade, it has been warned.

Brighton and Hove City Council leader Warren Morgan expects significant progress to be made by the end of the year on the £540 million redevelopment of Brighton seafront, which includes extending Churchill Square shopping centre to the seafront and creating a new venue at Black Rock.

The new venue would see a 10,000 capacity music venue created to replace the Brighton centre, which holds 4,500 people.

The centre would need to be knocked down to pave the way for the extended shopping centre and to create funding.

It is hoped the new Brighton arena would attract bands and other entertainment acts which residents currently have to travel to London to see.

Coun Morgan told The Argus he hopes the “negotiating phase” of the project to create a new centre at Black Rock and the redevelopment of Churchill Square would end by the close of 2015.

He was responding to concerns raised in the business community about the speed of progress on the project with the Brighton Centre already taking firm bookings up to 2019.

Previous plans for a £400 million refurbishment of the Brighton Centre were mooted for more than a decade and were never delivered by the hoped-for 2012 deadline.

The £540 million Brighton Waterfront development is estimated to bring an additional £4.6 million annually to the council and create 2,000 full-time jobs.

Coun Morgan said: “I’m still very keen that we get sign off on Black Rock and the extension of Churchill Square, collectively known as the Waterfront development, and King Alfred by the end of the calendar year.

“It would not mean work starting but some sort of committee agreement or in principle agreement, something along those lines, getting to the end of the negotiation part of the process.”

Coun Morgan said he had seen scepticism about big projects going ahead in the city despite the i360 going ahead.

He said: “There’s an understandable scepticism from the public that this type of project never gets off the ground, not withstanding the big thing getting off the ground on the seafront right now. But now is the time for these major projects to come forward.”

The East Brighton Labour councillor said he hoped some of the major projects in the city would be near to completion by the end of his first term in 2019.

He said it was a positive time for the city with several major proposals being brought to him which could all help to solve “the city’s problems” in creating jobs, training opportunities and transport issues.

He added: “Its right that they continue to take bookings and there is a plan in place to accommodate those bookings via alternative means in the city when those changes happen.

“Business continuity is really important in terms of attracting conference business and keeping it.

“Moving into a new centre, we need to work with other partners in the city to provide alternatives as and when that is necessary.”

Conservative councillor Vanessa Brown, who is on the Waterfront development’s project board, said: “We have always been supportive of this scheme and anything that can be done to speed up the timetable is to be welcomed.

“The council will clearly need to manage the closure of the existing Brighton Centre very carefully but this shouldn’t be an insurmountable obstacle.

“The success of the wider Waterfront project is very much dependent upon having reliable and effective transport links between the city centre and the new conference facility at Black Rock and we would urge the new administration to get this resolved as early in the process as possible.”