Our highways department is responsible for around 115,000 streetlights in the county – the majority of the street lights in Hertfordshire.
We aim to have 98% of our lights on A, B and C roads working at any given time across Hertfordshire. Our Highways contractor, Ringway, monitors and maintains streetlights on the county council’s behalf.
How do we maintain the lights on busy routes?
Roads are classed by the amount of traffic that use them each day. The major traffic routes are further broken down into A, B and C class roads.
The Department for Transport defines these as follows:
- A roads – major roads intended to provide large-scale transport links within or between areas.
- B roads – roads intended to connect different areas, and to feed traffic between A roads and smaller roads on the network.
- C roads – smaller roads intended to connect together unclassified roads with A and B roads and often linking a housing estate or a village to the rest of the network.
All the streetlights, lit bollards and lit signs on these roads are inspected at night, at least monthly. We will close down any routine 'streetlight out' fault reports on these routes as they will be picked up by our night time 'Scouts'. We prioritise any lighting issues that are a hazard to the public such as a leaning or knocked down street light or exposed wiring. These will be looked at within two hours.
Wherever possible, repairs to streetlights are coordinated with other road repairs at the same location, to make best use of resources and minimise traffic disruption. As these roads are busy, temporary traffic lights or other measures, such as coning off a lane, might need to be arranged to protect repair crews. Specialist equipment might need to be brought in for hard to reach lights or repairs might need to be made by the electricity provider. This means it often is not possible to make a repair immediately.
How do we maintain the lights on unclassified roads?
The Department for Transport defines these roads as follows:
- Unclassified – local roads intended for local traffic.
- The vast majority (60%) of roads in the UK fall within this category. These are typically low speed residential roads, such as cul-de-sacs.
We rely on the public to report streetlights on these roads.
What happens if we can't repair the light because there is power supply problem? For all classes of roads, if a problem is identified with the electricity supply then this is referred to UK Power Networks to action. We will continue to monitor, but rely on UKPN to deal with all power supply issues.
When reporting a fault it is important to identify the location accurately either by the lighting unit number (which appears on the column) or by street name and nearest house number or obvious point of reference.
Repairs are usually made during the day. Without precise identification details it is generally not possible to identify a light that is not working.
We aim to investigate and repair lights on these roads within 20 working days of registering the fault.
Find out more about street lighting at night.
We are currently upgrading streetlights on A roads to LED lights
Please report faulty lights, or use the 'subscribe' function on fault reporting, to receive updates on a previously reported lighting fault.