AN ANIMAL welfare charity is planning to build a £3m kennels and visitor centre to cater for hundreds of the region's abandoned animals.

The RSPCA hopes to build the centre on the site of a former community college in Chester-le-Street, which has recently gone into liquidation.

The proposed kennels will create 29 jobs in the town and cater for 80 cats and 84 dogs, making it the biggest RSPCA centre in the North-East.

Lauren Flanagan, spokeswoman for the RSPCA in the North, said the centre would also include a reception, a discovery room, classroom and a meeting room for animals to get to know their owners.

She added: "We want to acquire the land to build new cat pens and dog kennels for hundreds of animals that are abandoned in the North-East every year.

"That part of the region was quite desperate for a facility like this so we hope this facility will provide a much needed service.

"It is very good news for Chester-le-Street of course, especially as the new animal centre will be staffed by 29 RSPCA full-time workers and most of them will be staffed locally."

The charity bought a 100-acre farm at Chester Moor two years ago and has now purchased the adjoining old Felledge Primary School, which housed the recently closed Action Community College.

It is expected to be built in two phases and will include a landscaping and moulding scheme that should complement the surrounding woodland at the site just off Waldridge Lane.

The state-of-the-art facility, if granted planning permission, will help to ease the problem that saw 3,500 animals collected in Newcastle, Sunderland and Durham last year alone.

Currently animal carers would struggle to house them at kennels in Middlesbrough or Ayton.

Following the closure of facilities in Gateshead in the early Nineties, the charity has been looking for a suitable site for a new regional animal centre to re-house the increasingly large number of cats, dogs and other animals in need of help.

Chester-le-Street District Council planning committee is to consider the application on October 16.

l For more on the closure of the community college, See Page 4