FIROZ Kassam could be forced to carry out repair works on the long-vacant Priory pub to secure its future for Oxford United fans.

On Monday the Oxford Mail revealed the city council was considering legal action against Mr Kassam's company Firoka, which holds a 99-year lease on the council-owned Grade II listed building.

The council has now said Firoka was required to repair the pub as a condition of its planning permission - in 2005 - for a three-storey hotel next to the site.

In 2015 officers gave the firm an extension to the deadline for works to allow more time for investigations in developing the pub into a long-term business.

But planners - believing him to have breached the condition - have now given Mr Kassam an ultimatum and its enforcement team are working on a legal case to make him comply.

Mr Kassam said the city council planners were 'happy to let it rot' and called them to 'come to their senses' and help bring the building back to life and be commercially viable.

In an online poll 85 per cent of readers - with more than 500 votes - backed plans to restore and reopen the building as a pub once more.

Eight per cent wanted it to be knocked down and used as something else while seven per cent called for the site to be used for housing.

The Priory is more than 600 years old, having been built in the mid-1400s as a rebuild of part of Littlemore Priory, a nunnery founded in 1110.