Watlington street lights finally repaired months after fault reported

STREET lights in a main road in Watlington are now fixed — almost a year after they were first reported as faulty.

Bloor Homes Development for the South Midlands, based in Northampton, is responsible for maintaining and managing the street lighting in Cuxham Road, which have not been working properly for 10 months.

Scottish and Southern Energy (SSEN) was due to replace the electricity cable on Monday, December 29 but was delayed by two weeks.

At a full parish council meeting on Tuesday last week, Councillor Steve Bolingbroke said: “We have received confirmation that Bloor have taken some action and engaged with Scottish and Southern to fix the lighting. They had a look at it and discovered another break in the cable 30m away from the previous break.

“The lights did come back on after their investigation but they went back out again the next day.”

Bloor Homes have now confirmed that the street lighting has been fully repaired.

Cllr Bolingbroke told the Henley Standard that he had sent about 190 emails about the lighting, as well as issues with the footpath and the crossing on Pyrton Lane, where there have been two accidents.

He said: “What’s happened in the past, is that someone has come and had a look at it. They obviously had something reset and so the lights came back on but only for one night. Then the next night, they were off again.”

The parish council and Oxfordshire County Council both said that the maintenance work carried out by Bloor Homes caused the original damaging to the cables.

A spokesman for the county council said: “We have had several issues with the new street lighting that was installed by Bloor Homes.

“The resulting work has caused electrical service faults to the main supply feeding both S278 lighting columns and the remaining county council-owned columns just past the Cuxham Road roundabout. This was due to a servicing alteration work by developer.

“The county council has assisted by utilising our own contractor to aid Bloor in regard to Scottish and Southern Energy Network (SSEN) re-energising their cable network to ensure the electricity to the street lighting is being restored.

“SSEN has also previously made attempts to repair the cable damage, but this has only held for a limited time before failing.”

The county council added that SSEN laid 19m of new service cable to fix damages along the cable route, which were tested last week.

A spokeswoman for Bloor said: “We can now confirm that the lights on Cuxham Road are all fully illuminated and operating properly.”