West Suffolk Council office in the Guineas Shopping Centre, Newmarket, to close under new plans

A district authority is set to ‘leave’ Newmarket permanently - shutting its town centre office and telling residents to call or go online instead.

West Suffolk Council is set to approve a raft of office closures across the district – a move which will cost £130,000, including shelling out more than £100,000 in redundancy packages – as part of a review into how its taxpayers access the authority’s offices.

The office in the Guineas Shopping Centre, in Fred Archer Way, which has been closed since the government shut the country down last year, will not re-open under the plans.

In the report sent to the cabinet, the council has said that visitor numbers had dropped by 24 per cent between 2018/2019 and 2019/20, but did not reveal how many residents the total had fallen to.

It said the majority of queries related to Council Tax, and that all council services could be provided online or over the telephone.

Access to the multimillion pound public sector hub in Mildenhall is set to change, too.

The council is proposing to leave the customer service area unstaffed and ask all but the most vulnerable residents to use a telephone or a computer in the library to access council services.

The announcement of the council’s intention came on the same day that Matt Hancock, Newmarket and Mildenhall’s MP, praised the hub for bringing together council services with the Job Centre, police, and leisure centre.

West Suffolk Council said numbers of visitors to its old Mildenhall office had, like Newmarket, fallen.

The council said the costs of sacking its staff and changing its offices would be soon outweighed by the £95,000-a-year savings – and its closure bill would be paid off in one year five months.

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