Agenda item

The Panel received a report which provided feedback on the Council’s current street lighting contractor’s programmes and performance, and also discusses other issues relating to the street lighting central management system (CMS) and UK Power Networks (UKPN). The report was introduced by Mark Stevens, AD for Direct Services as set out in the agenda pack at pages 23 -28. The following arose as part of the discussion of this report:

1. The Panel sought clarification about whether the Council was on target to for the implementation of a new central management system by November 2023. In response, officers advised that a new lead officer had been appointed by Marlborough Highways and that they would be pushing Urbis Schreder to ensure that this was achieved. In general, officers advised that they were satisfied with the performance of Marlborough Highways but acknowledged that the performance of Urbis Schreder was less satisfactory.
2. The Chair advocated the importance of street lighting in terms of keeping people safe, and in particular in terms of preventing violence against women and girls. The Panel sought clarification about the process for fixing lamp columns that were broken. In response, officers advised that Marlborough Highways would go out and attempt to fix the problem, if the LED was damaged for instance. In some cases, the issue may be caused by a conflict between the CMS and the lighting equipment and they would try to resolve this where possible, however it may be a more fundamental problem. In cases where there was an electricity supply problem, the issue had to be referred to UKPN and they had 28 days to resolve the issue.
3. The Panel raised concerns about the time taken to fix broken lamp columns, particularly in Harringay ward. In response, officers apologised and acknowledged that there was a breakdown in the process between inspections and columns being incorrectly recorded as being fixed, which led to complaints. Officers advised that there was progress being made on this issue and advised that the team were working hard to resolve it.
4. In response to a follow up question, the Assistant Director advised that he first became aware that this was a bigger problem that just individual components not working, following the last scrutiny panel meeting. Officers advised that they were concerned that there was a bigger problem after hearing from Members of the panel and going back to the team and looking at the issue in more detail. Officers advised that they shared members’ frustrations about lamp columns seemingly being reported as fixed when they were not.
5. In response to a further question, officers set out that the Highways Group Engineer had been tasked with overseeing this issue and that it was expected that the issue would be resolved. The Team had been asked to a keep a record of the works that had been done and the issues that came up, and to ensure that issues were being fixed.
6. The Panel suggested that the number of open cases should be a red flag, both in terms of street lighting faults, but also more widely across frontline services. Concerns were raised that in this instance it seems to have been councillors raising the issue that has alerted officers to their being a more fundamental problem. In response, the Assistant Director acknowledged these concerns and advised that the KPI data around street lighting faults was now being examined as a much higher level that it had previously and that he expected that the problem would be resolved fairly shortly.

RESOLVED

Noted