Green light for new council HQ plans

An application for a new office building in Ashington, which is set to become the new home of Northumberland County Council, was approved 5 April.The scheme was unanimously backed by the authority’s strategic planning committee this afternoon as even those councillors opposed to the move from Morpeth to Ashington could not find any significant fault with the plans for a five-storey office block.Questions were raised about car parking and the possibility of former mine workings affecting the building, but officers assured committee members that these issues had either been addressed adequately already or would be via conditions attached to the approval.The application is for a five-storey, grade-A office building and the provision of around 500 parking spaces at a site on Lintonville Road. The site is in Ashington town centre and forms part of the North East Quarter, which is a wider development scheme for the area that includes the new leisure centre.The new headquarters is to be developed on a commercial basis by applicant Arch, ‘with an aspiration of a lease to Northumberland County Council’. The new building would comprise office space for 910 work stations, a community drop-in centre, a double-height chamber and conference facilities plus meeting rooms, a café and central atrium space.