Lighting a way forward

Anyone living in Lymm will be aware that much of our street lighting is, in the jargon, ‘time expired’. Many roads seem to have 57 varieties of street lamps in various states of repair or disrepair. It is clear that our street lighting has been neglected and underinvested in for decades.

When I was elected to the Executive Board, one of the first decisions I was involved in was to approve the lighting maintenance budget of about £ 500,000. It wasn’t until after the vote that I asked some questions and did some calculations. Perhaps I should have done that before the vote, but there wasn’t any more money whatever my results.

It turns out that Warrington Borough Council is responsible for about 26,000 lighting columns, each of which costs on average £2000 to replace. That is £52 million pounds worth of equipment being maintained with a £ 1/2 million pound budget. I challenge anyone to make that work, I calculated that that is enough money to keep only about a third of our lighting stock working.

I started to look around at what other authorities have done and found that some, Leeds in particular, had used the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to provide the funding for new more eco-friendly energy efficient lighting to replace their worn out energy greedy stock.

 I don’t like PFI, nor do Liberal Democrats generally. It is a way of hiding public spending, passing the cost onto future tax payers and in the end paying more. Unfortunately under the present, and the last, government there is no alternative. In fact the government offers PFI credits, a subsidy to encourage PFI deals.

When our new head of highways, David Boyer arrived in post, I mentioned my concern about street lighting to him and the initiatives I had heard about elsewhere. He has followed this up and the Executive Board approved an expression of interest in a PFI funded project to update Warrington’s lighting. As worn out lights are highest on the priority list much of Lymm should benefit.

We heard this week that our application has been successful. The Department for Transport has provisionally allocated £ 45m of PFI credits to enable Warrington to upgrade street lighting. We now have to put in a final proposal and the deal needs to be approved by the Executive. However, at last, there appears to be a way forward that will stop the lights in Lymm going out

2 thoughts on “Lighting a way forward

  1. Kamie Kitmitto says:

    Hi Bob

    I hope you will be also veering Warrington to investigate LED street lighting thus reducing your maintenance, Power bill, and carbon foot print also!

    Kamie

  2. Bob Barr says:

    Hi Kamie, I certainly will!

    Bob

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