A WEBSITE offering a one-stop shop for council services in the North-East has been launched.

The Community Services Portal aims to make it easy for residents to access local authority services and information from one point. Along with Internet access, about 40 kiosks will be placed in town and city centres.

It means that for the first time, users in one local authority area can check information from another area from the same kiosk.

It will initially cover the councils of Gateshead, Sunderland, Newcastle, South Tyneside and North Tyneside. But the system has been structured to make it easy to expand the network to cover all the other 19 councils in the North-East.

The £500,000 scheme was part-funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. The first kiosks will be up and running in Sunderland by February.