A small council committee, which met in private to rubber-stamp controversial plans to spend thousands of pounds on a legal battle over a key road project, is set to be scrapped after a councillor intervented.

Maidstone Borough Council's Urgency Committee - made up of the leaders of the five main political groups - met for the first time in three years last May to approve a decision to take Kent County Council to court.

The row centred around the use of funding from developers for modelling the proposed Leeds-Langley bypass.

However, MBC argued that the county council had siphoned off money intended to fund improvements to Sutton Road in order to fund the feasibility exercise.

A judge threw out Maidstone’s application in July and the town hall was told to fork out £9,000 in legal costs, though council chiefs are due to return to the High Court for another hearing on March 21.

Councillors were due to approve the renewal of the Urgency Committee - along with several others - in its current form at a full council meeting on Wednesday, though the move was rejected by Cllr Jonathan Purle (Conservative).

His intervention forced the council to suspend the meeting for 15 minutes while it took "urgent legal advice", before it was decided the entire agenda item could not be resolved.

Cllr Purle and colleagues claim the committee itself is not sufficiently representative, nor open to scrutiny, and bemoaned the lack of debate among councillors as to the merits of the legal action before the committee made its decision.

Cllr Alan Bartlett (Conservative) said: “Maidstone’s roads need a major upgrade: we have all these extra cars that come with all the extra building.

"Yet here we have a council, obsessed with making life difficult for motorists, causing hundreds-of-thousands of pounds of council taxpayers’ money to be blown taking KCC to court, and

using a tiny unrepresentative committee of council insiders to rubber stamp their decision.

"There has been no wider scrutiny. It is absolutely right that we are challenging this.”

Chief executive Alison Broom told the meeting: "We made a commitment to conduct a review of the composition of committees and the way political balance is achieved across the council, and that the task would be executed by the Democracy Committee.

"There has been a huge amount of work invested to do so, so that by the time we come to the Annual General Meeting in May, the points previously raised will have been addressed.

"That process has not been completed because we are not yet at the AGM."

An MBC spokesperson said: "The Urgency Committee consists of the leaders of the five largest groups represented on the council.

"Its purpose is to take any urgent Policy and Resources Committee or council decisions in between scheduled meetings and where the decision needs to be taken before the next meeting in order to protect the Council’s interest.

"The reallocation of seats report was submitted to the Full Council meeting on Wednesday following the resignation of Councillor Chris Garland from the Conservative Party and his move to the Independent Group in January.

"In accordance with legislation, as a councillor dissented to the report at the meeting, the seats were not reallocated and remain as they previously were including the Urgency Committee.

"The Democracy Committee has carried out a review of the C committees and as a result will be recommended to council in April 2019 that the Urgency Committee is deleted."