Street lights that never switch off are wasting energy all over Milton Keynes, complains city dignitary

A city Alderman has complained about the number of street lights that are burning 24 hours a day in MK.

Paul Bartlett, who served as a local Tory councillor for 16 years, has accused MK City Council of failing to take action and wasting costly energy as well as taxpayers’ money.

"The council likes to think it is following a green agenda but in fact it’s usually rhetoric, he said.

“Despite numerous complaints in recent years, and more recently this summer, they have failed to take action to reduce energy waste and its own electricity bill… I just don't get it.

Mr Bartlett, who is also a member of Stony Stratford Town Council, says there is a whole street on the Fairfields estate – Apollo Avenue -where the lights are never switched off.

He is also fuming about a long stretch of lights at Central Milton Keynes that have been burning 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for almost a year now. Ironically some of them are right outside the council’s own civic offices.

The faulty lights run along 2km, stretching through Secklow Gate and Silbury Boulevard, between Saxon Gate to Overgate, and also on the footway between the civic offices and Lloyds Court.

They were first reported to MK Council by CMK Town Council in February this year, but it is understood the problem had started many weeks before that.

Mr Bartlett said: "Every day hundreds of employees of Milton Council, including senior officers and also councillors from the administration, will drive and walk by hundreds of street lights on their way to work – and yet nothing is done.”

An MK City Council spokesman told the Citizen: “Due to how MK’s unique city centre streetlights are powered, a fault in a local electricity supply cabinet can affect 20 or more lights. While the electricity supplier is fixing the cabinet, our choice is either to bypass the sensor to keep the lights on all the time, or off all the time. As soon as the cabinet is repaired, the lights go back to their usual setting.”

They added: "We’re looking at replacing these streetlights with modern energy efficient versions that still maintain the look and feel of the original, but are easier to maintain.”