Lighting the roads

Hertfordshire Highways is responsible for around 115,000 street lights in the county - essentially all the streetlights in Hertfordshire except those on motorways and some estate footpaths.

Cost of street lighting

The electricity bill for running these lights was almost £3.5m last year, and is increasing rapidly. We also spent around £5m on routine maintenance such as electrical repairs and replacing bulbs.

Additionally, many of our lamp posts are old and need replacing. Last year we spent over £1.5m replacing worn out columns.

Hertfordshire's streetlights are responsible for 22,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year - a fifth of the county council's total - and from next year the government will charge us almost £300,000 a year for this.

Switching off lights

To reduce the £10m street lighting bill - as well as our carbon footprint - the county council's Cabinet has agreed, in principle, to turn off some of the county's street lights for all or part of the night.

Hertfordshire Highways is preparing detailed proposals for the January Highways & Transport Panel, based on the principle that lights could be switched off completely in areas with low footfall and rural areas, while part-night lighting might be more appropriate in urban areas.

Maintaining the lights

To make sure our lights are working properly, we employ a team of street light 'scouts' who travel around the county at night looking for street light faults, including those with exposed wiring and those which are not working at all. These scouts follow a set route which enables them to check every street light in the county every ten days.

Once they find a fault they pass the details on to the dedicated street light repair team who will repair it within 10 working days. If you report a fault with a street light we will work to fix the fault much more quickly than this.

As well as repairing street lights when any problems occur we replace all of the county's street light lamps once every three years on a rolling programme.

Reporting a fault

If you spot a fault with a street light you can report it by visiting www.hertsdirect.org/highwayfaults
The length of time we need to repair a street light problem depends on the type of fault you have reported:

• We will make safe any street light with exposed wiring within two hours and repair it in 24 hours.
  
• We will repair all other types of fault you have reported within ten working days providing the fault is not due to an electricity supply problem. If electricity supply is the problem, due to an electricity cable problem, or the light requires specialist materials and/or equipment, we will work closely with the electricity supply company (UK Power Networks, formerly EDF Energy) to ensure a speedy solution.
  
• If a permanent repair is not immediately possible (this is usually because we need to get hold of a part which is no longer made or special in some way) we will make the light safe until a long term repair can be carried out.

No two street lights are the same and every street light in the county has its own identification number which is referred to as an Asset ID. The ID is made up from the name of the street and a number found at the bottom of the light column. Knowing the ID code of a faulty light helps us respond more quickly, rather than wasting time trying to guess which light to fix if the problem isn?t obvious.

If you spot a faulty street light and are able to note down the ID number and street name please include it when reporting the fault - this will help us deal with the fault more quickly.