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Council’s Street Lighting Policy

Published: 09/03/2015

A revised street lighting policy, which aims to provide the most cost effective and efficient service, and minimise the Council’s carbon footprint, is being discussed by Councillors this week (beginning Monday 9 March). Flintshire County Council owns and maintains over 21,000 street lights and 3,250 illuminated signs across the County. It also maintains trunk road lighting on behalf of Welsh Government. The annual consumption of electricity for all these units is currently in excess of £864,000 a year. The street lighting service has made a commitment to reduce its carbon footprint through a range of measures, which has included installing energy saving equipment and low energy lighting units for all replacements. The revised draft policy will introduce an extension to the part night street lighting – with proposals to turn off street lights in selected non residential areas between midnight and 5am and midnight and 6am in selected residential areas. Standard response times for repairing Flintshire County Council street lighting faults are being amended to 10 working days. The exception to this are locations which have been risk assessed such as vulnerable areas (for example, sheltered housing, CCTV and other defined critical sites), where the standard time will remain as three working days. As well as providing energy efficiencies and carbon reduction savings these measures are expected to see a potential saving of £50,000 per year once fully implemented. Councillor Bernie Attridge, Cabinet Member for Environment, said “The overall objective of the Council’s street lighting policy is to manage and maintain a safe and efficient street lighting network that ensures the safety of all road users, pedestrians and cyclists. It also recognises that an efficient street lighting network is one of the ways that the Council plays a major part in helping to reduce crime, improve driver behaviour, and promote a safer community. “The Policy is being revised as part of our challenge to find efficiencies across the Council in the coming financial year, and the plans to reduce street lighting resource and introduce part night street lighting were agreed as part of the budget setting proposals.” As part of the Scrutiny process, County, town and community councillors will be discussing the revisions at workshops being held early in the week. The revised Policy will then be subject to approval at Cabinet in April 2015.