Move Confirmed for Whitley Bay Police
28th May 2015
A planned office move has been confirmed for Whitley Bay neighbourhood officers.
The team will re-locate to an office within the nearby Park View shopping centre in the centre of the community. The new ground floor premises will have a front office facility with the same opening hours as the current station, on Laburnum Avenue, of 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday.
Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Vera Baird reached this decision to re-locate the team after carefully considering the views of local people. Residents were asked to give their feedback about the plans, after visiting a display in the Whitley Bay Customer First Centre last month, and completing a comments card. Other people also gave their input on the plans after speaking to officers at local events and community drop-ins.
Mrs Baird said: “We took into account a range of views from local residents, businesses and community groups. We wanted to ensure that neighbourhood officers remain a highly visible policing resource in a location which is accessible for people to visit, to make it easy for residents and other people to continue to get the policing service they need from their officers.
“It was heartening to see that many comments were fully supportive of the move and the reasons behind it. We have ensured that there is parking within the shopping centre for operational vehicles. We want to reassure people that before we proposed the shopping centre site we looked at a number of alternatives including sharing premises with other public sector partners. However, we found by pursuing this we could not get the accessible central location which is of primary importance to residents and our officers.
“It’s also important that the police service gets value for money from the limited resources available. This means making sure the buildings we use are efficient to run, we have found that many of our older stations are expensive to maintain.”
Neighbourhood Inspector Jim Gray: “We welcome this decision as it means the neighbourhood team will retain a strong central presence in our town centre which we know local people value highly. We are committed to continuing to deliver a high quality policing service for our communities and this move will help us achieve this.”
Whitley Bay neighbourhood team will move into the Park View office later this year, afterwards the old station will be sold and the proceeds put back into policing.
To contact the Neighbourhood Policing Team call 101, extension 69191, or visit the Northumbria Police website, www.northumbria.police.uk
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