The battle is hotting up and both camps are desperate for victory.

The campaign to have a new breast cancer unit in either Brighton or Haywards Heath is nearing its end.

It began when health chiefs announced last year that they wanted to close the Nigel Porter Unit for Breast Care at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton and move it to the Princess Royal Hospital site in Haywards Heath, where there would be more room to expand.

Health chiefs said they could not find anywhere suitable on the Royal Sussex site to build a new unit.

The Argus launched a petition to keep the unit in Brighton and more than 30,000 people signed it in just 11 days.

All city MPs and councillors gave their support.

Medical experts said all medical services, which support the treatment of breast cancer, such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy and pathology, should be on one site.

This would not be the case if the unit moved to Haywards Heath.

Retired consultant surgeon Nigel Porter, of Henfield, who the Brighton unit was named after, said: "It is fragmenting the service.

"It is not, in terms of top-class health care, a good idea."

Dr Richard Sullivan, head of clinical programs at Cancer Research UK, agreed and said the unit should remain adjacent to the other cancer treatments at the Royal Sussex.

Stuart Welling, chief executive of the Brighton and Sussex University's Hospitals NHS Trust, admitted the unit would be better in Brighton.

When he announced the transfer, he said: "In an ideal world, we wouldn't move it."

But Mr Welling no longer needs to move the unit because a site has been found in Brighton.

Rosaz House is ideally situated opposite the Sussex Oncology Department at the Royal Sussex and has been given outline planning permission for the new breast cancer care centre.

Leonie Petrarca, who is campaigning to keep the unit in Brighton, said: "We will be writing to Mr Welling asking him if he will stand by his words.

"He said the only reason they wanted to move the unit was for space. Now they don't have to.

"From clinical evidence, the best cancer care is carried out on one site, not in a fragmented service.

"What the women of Mid Sussex need to realise is their unit is not under threat. It is the Brighton unit that could be lost."

Few people in Mid Sussex have realised their breast cancer unit in Haywards Heath will remain in operation, whatever the decision.

Des Turner, Labour MP for Kemp Town, Brighton, criticised campaigners in Mid Sussex for demanding the unit moves to Haywards Heath He said: "I really think it's out of order. It's not as if the people of Haywards Heath don't have a service.

"It would be most disadvantageous to Brighton women in terms of overall quality of treatment if they were to get away with moving it."

The negative impact of a move would affect the majority who use the Brighton-based service.

Of the 3,000 people a year using the Nigel Porter Unit, most are from Brighton and Hove and the coastal strip between Eastbourne and Worthing.

Only about 300 patients a year travel from Mid Sussex for cancer support services such as radiotherapy.

And 41 per cent of people living in Brighton and Hove do not own a car, compared to 21 per cent of people in Mid Sussex. More city residents depend on public transport.

An Argus investigation into public transport links between Brighton and Hove and Haywards Heath showed the journey would take four buses and one taxi and cost £8.80 for a return trip.

The return journey would take from two hours five minutes to four hours 27 minutes, depending on the time the journey was taken.

The Government's own statistics show parts of Brighton are deprived.

These people are recognised as more likely to suffer from cancer, yet they are also the ones less likely to be able to access medical care, particularly if it is 17 miles away.

Alan Milburn, the Secretary for Health, said in the Government's NHS Cancer Plan in September 2000: "The poor are still far more likely to get cancer than the rich, and their chances of survival are lower too."

The plan sets out the desire to keep together prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment and care for cancer to give everyone the best possible chance of beating it.

Liver cancer victim Brian Compton made an appeal to The Argus before his death in February this year.

His first wife, Anne, died aged 46 in 1990 after a ten-year battle with breast cancer.

Mr Compton, who was living in Redhill Drive, Westdene, Brighton, with his second wife Angela when he died, said Anne was often too ill to attend appointments miles away and was left exhausted by the distances they had to travel.

Mr Compton died before he could witness whether health chiefs would listen to the people who had experienced life with cancer.

He said: "If people had to travel to Haywards Heath it would be a similar scenario to what we went through 20 years ago.

"Sometimes we would get to the hospital to be told there was no longer a bed available."

The final decision about the location of the new unit will be made on September 27.