Street light maintenance
Maintaining Suffolk¡¯s street lights
Customers can use this service to report faulty or broken street lights. This page will tell you which organisation you need to contact and how to report a particular problem.
Who is responsible for maintaining and repairing street lights?
Suffolk County Council maintains and repairs most street lights in Suffolk. As well as repairing faults, lamp columns are inspected and tested to make sure they won¡¯t fall down or cause an electric shock. Potentially dangerous columns are replaced. Lights are cleaned every year and lamps changed periodically.
However, lights on the following roads are maintained by W S Atkins, telephone: 0800 3891736:
- A11 from Newmarket to Thetford and Norwich;
- A12 (north) from Lowestoft (River Waveney/Bascule lifting bridge) to Great Yarmouth;
- A12 (south) from Ipswich to Colchester and London; and
- A14 from the Midlands to Felixstowe.
Some other lights are the responsibility of borough, district, town or parish councils but some of these organisations have requested the county council to manage these on their behalf.
Some new lighting is provided by developers of new housing estates. Once the development is complete, the street lighting, roads and pavements are usually handed over to the county council for their future maintenance. Until this happens, any faults with these lights need to be reported to the developer.
Possible problems with the electrical supplyIf a street light is flickering it might not be that the street light alone is at fault, but the electrical supply is faulty. If your house lights are also flickering, this could indicate an electrical supply fault. If this is the case, please contact EDF Energy on: 0800 783 8838.
Reporting a faulty street lightStreet lights owned and maintained by Suffolk County Council have a plastic plate attached to the lamp column which gives a reference number for the column and a freephone number to call to report the fault. To report a faulty street light which you think is the responsibility of the county council, it would be helpful if you could provide us with the following information:
- details of the fault eg is the light not working at all? is it an intermittent fault? is the light staying on during the day?;
- reference number on the lamp column;
- road name;
- town or parish
If you do not know the reference number on the lamp colulmn, please give some other means of locating the light, such as a nearby house number. From this information we will know whether the light is one which is maintained by Suffolk County Council and if it is not, try to provide you with information on who may own and maintain it (but we may not always have this information).
The freephone telephone numbers for reporting faulty streetlights are:
- Bury St Edmunds town: 0800 591058;
- Ipswich Borough Council council tax payers: 0800 591057;
- Lowestoft: 0800 591056;
- rest of Suffolk: 0800 591055.
Suffolk County Council¡¯s contractor inspects street lights at night to find out which ones are not working. The target time to repair faulty street lights (whether they are reported to us by the public or discovered as a result of the inspections) is normally within two weeks. However, depending on the cause of the problem, this is not always possible. If we find the cause of a faulty light is a problem with the electricity supply, we will refer it to the electricity supplier, currently EDF Energy. It can take several months for EDF Energy to fix the fault, dependent on their other commitments at the time.
In some cases, it is not possible to repair streelights as there in not enough safety clearance from the overhead cables for the workers. This means that we can notcarry out any work on the light without EDF staff or switching the electricity off. Additionally, the light may not be owned by the County Council. If it is not we will be required to get approval from the owner for any work that may be necessary. Due to the complexity of these issues, and the fact that every light and site is different, we are unable to give any timescales for when the light may be working again.
This is an issue with a large number of lights across the county and every effort is being made to resolve each light as soon as we can. In addition we are working to try and find permanent solutions, by moving lanterns, so that we do not have the same problem again.
Requests for new lightingIf you think an additional streetlight is necessary, you could contact your local parish or district council to see whether they would support the request for additional lighting. They would normally be expected to pay for the costs of the initial installation, and any associated maintenance and energy costs. The provision of new lighting has been very restricted for a number of years. The county council is trying to reduce light pollution, energy consumption and maintenance costs, and is very unlikely to provide any additional lighting.
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