Area’s broken street lights set to shine

An extra £1 million will be used by the Department of Regional Development to the repair broken street lights.

The move has been welcomed by local DUP MLA Sydney Anderson.

Mr Anderson stated, “I fully welcome the news that Transport Minister Michelle McIlveen has committed an extra £1 million funding to tackle the backlog of broken street lights right across Northern Ireland.

“This additional money is included in an extra £24 million allocation by the Executive to the Department of Regional Development as part of the November monitoring round to provide enhanced public services such as repairing potholes and other road maintenance works.

“I welcome the fact that £15.5 million of resource funding will be directed towards routine road maintenance, whilst DRD has also received £5 million to be directed towards capital structural maintenance of roads.

“Additionally, £2 million will be used for concessionary fares and £0.6 million will be used for community transport.

It is positive to hear that broken street lights will now be dealt with as they are a major concern for the public, especially during the dark winter nights.

2It is believed that there are over 7,000 street lights not working across Northern Ireland, but the actual figure could be significantly higher.

“The Department have now ramped up the service and Transport NI is working alongside external contractors to conduct repairs and clear the backlog which is expected to take a number of months.”

Sydney Anderson MLA continued by stating,

“Now that this funding has been put in place to deal with the problem of broken street lights it is important that Transport NI are fully aware of the locations of such lights.

“As such DRD has developed an online system on nidirect which can be used by the public to report street lighting problems in their area.

“Alternatively, I would encourage members of the public to contact my constituency office to deal with such issues.”