LETTER: Move funds to make street lighting repairs

By January 2017, nothing had happened, so on January 17, I sent another e mail asking them to chase this up. On January 18, I had a response by email saying they would do this.

Being on a blind bend with the long winter evenings, my wife and I were becoming concerned about backing out in the dark and had a couple of near misses from cars speeding round in the dark.

By February the light still had not been repaired, so I contacted the chairman of the local parish council who put me in touch with a local councillor. The reply I received appalled me. He told me that apparently there is no programmed maintenance for street light repairs across the county, bulbs are now allowed to “burn to extinction” before they are repaired. As a consequence there are now more than 1,000 street lights requiring repair, during the darkest months of the winter. There are apparently not enough qualified personnel to deal with this situation.

Clearly this is totally unsatisfactory, so can I make a suggestion? Perhaps the council redirect some of the funding allocated for snow and ice clearing, which has not been used during last year and this year’s mild winter, to employ more staff to address this backlog of street light repairs?

At the time of writing, the street light is still out, some 15 weeks after I initially reported it.

Martin Wilcock

Crow Hole, Barlow