More than 2,000 jobs are expected to be created after plans to redevelop a power station were given the green light.

German firm Uniper applied to Medway Council to create a development spanning 315,000 sq m on the site of the former Kingsnorth plant on the Hoo Peninsula.

The coal and oil powered station was decommissioned in December 2012.

The new site - called MedwayOne - will include storage, a data centre, lorry park, and manufacturing space.

The applicant claims the site will generate £44 million a year once completed and attract long-term investment into the Towns.

Bosses also said it would create 700 jobs during the build, and 2,055 after.

One of the elements of the scheme will be an energy from a waste plant which will be used to power the development.

The plans were scrutinised during a planning committee meeting on Wednesday.

Although some councillors welcomed bringing the brownfield site back into usefulness, there were concerns about the environmental and traffic impact.

Labour councillors asked for more time for those issues to be ironed out, but this request was turned down.

Cllr Stephen Hubbard (Lab) said road improvements proposed in the council's Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) plans may not go far enough to address the amount of traffic the site could generate.

Among the measures proposed so far include creating a new junction on the A289 Hasted Road and improvements to Woodfield Way.

He said: "The biggest issue on this application site is the traffic is to the site.

"We know that the A228 is a single road in and a single road out."

Committee chairman Cllr Diane Chambers (Con) said: "There were always going to be implications for traffic but there's also comment about the housing which will go at Hoo.

"It would seem to be that the most sustainable approach is, if there's going to be housing at Hoo, there's also employment at Hoo and I think that you need to make sure that these things move along in tandem.

"We owe it to the people across the whole of Medway to make sure that we have the opportunities for them to have employment for years to come."

The proposals were passed by a margin of one vote.

The power station's chimney was demolished in 2018 following closure of the plant six years earlier.

The station was commissioned in the early 1970s and was capable of producing up to 1320MW of power - enough electricity to power more than a million homes and businesses.

It shut in December 2012, after it reached a 20,000-hour operations threshold set out by an EU directive.

In 2010, energy firm E.ON shelved plans to build a new coal plant at Kingsnorth, forcing the government to abandon its proposals for a new fleet of coal plants.

More than a third of the UK's electricity was generated by coal in 2007 but in 2017 that had dropped to just 7%.