An angry and emotional meeting saw councillors and officers put the survival of a much loved hospice ahead of Green Belt and traffic concerns on Tuesday - despite angry outbursts from furious opponents.

Members of the Royal Borough's planning panel voted by 11 votes to two to allow the Thames Hospice in Hatch Lane, Windsor to leave its cramped premises and set up a new, vastly expanded service on a Green Belt site leading off a busy and potentially dangerous road in Bray.

Hospice chief executive Debbie Raven told councillors the hospice was having to turn people away at the moment because there was not room, saying: "One of the hardest decision our doctors have to make is deciding who we can offer our service to."

Cllr Phill Bicknell (Conservative: Park) - the council's deputy leader - poignantly revealed his first wife had died at the hospice.

He said: "We have to understand that this is the last part of a person's life.

"I would not want to impede the forward movement of this hospice."

But an exasperated public opponent of the plan stormed out moments later shouting 'how do you know I am not dying'?

The planning officers' own report conceded that the proposed development was inappropriate in the Green Belt, would encroach into the countryside - and would need councillors to accept that 'very special circumstances' existed strong enough to overule all this.

Bray residents living near the site shouted and barracked the meeting.

Resident Anu Chawla told councillors allowing the hospice development would have a devastating impact on the area.

She said: "There is growing concern about councils not listening to residents and the bad planning. This is a semi-rural area and they are proposing an industrial scale development."

Several councillors who voted to allow the hospice to set up again at Bray also expressed concern about the safety aspect of cars turning into the proposed new hospice site from or onto Windsor Road.

But in the end councillors voted to leave final approval to the officers to negotiate and indicated they will not block it.

*

After 30 years on its present site in Hatch Lane, Windsor, Thames Hospice has been given the go-ahead to expand onto a new site on land south of Bray Lake off Windsor Road, Bray.

The new proposed 28 bed hospice will also support an out patient unit, counselling and education facilities.

The outpatients unit will include a family support centre containing a day room, physiotherapy centre with bathing facilities and a suite of consulting and counselling rooms.

The education centre will offer training to staff and the general public with the aim of equipping others to offer high quality end of life care.

The building is in a series of single and two storey projections reaching 12 metres at their highest point and arranged around a spherical hub.

The site is bounded by a public footpath which runs around the lake to the north and the A308 to the south.

The land to the west of the site is agricultural fields and the proximity of water and fields was seen as the ideal environment for people facing the last stage of their life.