Neighbours in one part of Merseyside are annoyed that a row of street lights located in their back gardens have broken, leaving the pathway completely unlit.
Council bosses remain confused about why the street lights, in the Holmlands estate in Oxton, Wirral, currently stand in people’s gardens as opposed to outside them on the public path.
A letter sent to Oxton Lib Dem councillor Allan Brame, by Mark Smith, Wirral Council’s director of highways and streetscene, said: “We are not sure whether there has been some land encroachment over time.
“However, reviewing our highway adoption and Land Registry records does not provide any clear historic evidence of how this situation has come about.”
But Stuart Kelly, also a Lib Dem councillor in Oxton, said the idea that residents have expanded their back gardens so that the street lights fall within their boundaries is wrong.
Cllr Kelly said: “Those fences have been there since the estate was built in the mid 1970s.
“What no one can understand is why the lights were not placed on the grass verge alongside the path.”
Cllr Kelly first noticed the problem when reporting a couple of the lights along the path as broken.
The street lights were inaccessible to contractors, as they stood behind garden fences.
To make matters worse, all the street lights along the footpath have now broken, plunging it into darkness.
In response to this, Mr Smith is asking Wirral Council’s cabinet to approve £40,000 of capital spending to put the street lights on the public side of the fence.
He originally wanted the funding approved this month, with a view to doing the work in June.
However that request could be affected by the coronavirus outbreak and the strain it is putting on council services.
Mr Smith said the work needed would require extensive work to replace not just the lights but the power supply to them.
He said: “To resolve this will require every column being replaced with a fold down solution for future maintenance, as well as replacement of the whole power supply cable, followed by the disconnection and removal of the redundant columns from each residents’ back garden.
“This is approximately 340 metres of trenching with associated power cable and approximately eight lighting columns and electrical terminations etc.”
Cllr Kelly said the situation is “one of the more unusual problems we have been asked to sort out and we share residents’ frustration that the council has taken so long to come forward with a solution”.
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