I FULLY concur with Margaret Baker from Noctorum's letter criticising the council's lack of strategy and priority in repairing our broken street lights.
I am glad there are others who feel the same as I do, because, as Margaret rightly points out, the Streetscene department continue to hold residents' wishes in contempt by refusing to repair the most pressing faults or outages which have been repeatedly reported to them, whilst focusing instead on fixing what clearly isn't broken, as usual.
So far, of the almost 500 faults / broken lights I have logged with them over the last two years alone, only a measly percentage (around 30 to 40 in total) have actually been repaired or replaced to this day, and the backlog continues to grow by the week.
Many locations which I logged as far back as May 2016 have still yet to be tackled or resolved.
I have already had several meetings with Streetscene officers to discuss the faults, but even here, they simply will not co-operate and implement a schedule based on common sense, and repair the lights on the lists they are provided with.
Such a simple task of replacing these or installing new columns subject to requisite highway access seems to be clearly beyond them.
Just how can any council in the UK be so utterly inept and incapable of fixing broken lights within an acceptable timescale defies comprehension.
Their usual PR about replacing all the lights before Autumn 2021 is more blatant spin.
If they cannot repair a backlog of over 470 broken lights in three years, then what realistic chance have they of repairing/replacing 27,000 in just 18-20 months?
Name and address supplied
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