Plan to turn out the lights
Friday 9th April 2010, 11:17AM BST.
Street lights across Shropshire could be switched off under radical plans to save money and combat climate change, it was revealed today.
Dimmer switches could be fitted to some street lights while others could be turned off altogether. And the cost-cutting scheme could be piloted in Ellesmere, it has emerged.
Shropshire Council is considering the plan as it battles public spending cuts and bids to deliver a 35 per cent reduction in its carbon footprint over the next five years.
The authority’s ruling cabinet has already adopted an official carbon management plan which commits it to reaching the target.
It comes after it emerged in February that 1,350 street lights across Telford could be switched off to shave £76,000 a year from Telford & Wrekin Council’s £1 million lighting budget. In Powys councillors have decided to turn off more than half of its 14,000 lights in a bid to save £225,000.
Details of Shropshire Council’s fresh plans em-erged at a meeting of Ellesmere Town Council last night.
Councillor Ann Hartley, Shropshire Council cabinet member, said the idea was being mooted but was at “a very early stage”.
Ellesmere is one of the locations being considered to pilot cuts.
“We are being mooted as pilots for a scheme for cutting down on street lighting. It wouldn’t go off completely but the council is looking at fitting dimmer switches on street lights therefore allowing them to be turned down or switching off every other one in a group,” she said.
She said police and emergency services would have to be consulted on the idea if it takes off. And she said that by introducing measures to slash carbon emissions council coffers would be boosted in the long-term if the ambitious target is met.”
Philip Edwards, for Shropshire Council, said Ellesmere Town Council had been approached to see whether it would consider taking part in a pilot scheme.
He said: “Due to the national imperative to reduce energy usage, to safeguard supplies, people are asking us what measures we are taking to reduce energy and CO2 emissions.
“Many local authorities are approaching this issue by varying lighting levels of street lights outside busy hours when traffic and pedes- trian levels are much lower.”
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fanstastic idea, prudent with my taxes and green too, well done
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It is becoming more and more apparent that councils are using the “myth” of climate change to use as an excuse to increase taxes and cut costs.
What about the potential car crime increases or house burglaries?
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Radical new plan? It’s what used to happen in many towns, including Wellington. Only certain street lights would remain on, most were turned off after midnight and then turned on for a few hours until dawn.
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As Sir Edward Grey might have said – the lamps are going out all over Shropshire, we shall not see them lit again in our time.
I do hope that Shropshire Council will remember to talk to the various Parish and Town Councils that also provide and pay for street lighting before they go ahead with the idea.
And the police – after all we do not want to end up with an increase in the crime figures as a result – the decision must be a balanced one.
And in the end if it does happen – is anyone placing any bets on a reduction in council tax?
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Make it so that only the people like Observer who want them left blazing away all night pay for them. That seems fair.
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good
it would also help if people supported the lighter later campaign (lighterlater dot org) which would save the whole UK hundreds of millions pounds in energy, traffic accidents and climate change
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Well, it was only a matter of time, wasn’t it.
Change the bit that says “Street Lights COULD be turned off” to “WILL be turned off”. They’ll have the usual ‘consultation’ and ‘pilot’ scheme – and then they’ll do it anyway.
Personally I think its a good idea – to save money. But the bit about ‘combating climate change’ is just the usual PR nonsense. As long as they don’t spend the money saved elsewhere, eg: by increasing councillors allowances, or – even worse – increasing the salaries of senior directors who are already raking in the cash.
Oh, and if they want to improve carbon footprints (yeah right..) by reducing the streetlighting, then perhaps they could get their OWN houses in order by extinguishing lighting that is left blazing in council buildings. Funnily enough, I bet they’ll claim that *this* doesn’t significantly save money (or reduce the carbon footprint by much…)
Good old Shropshire Council. They never change:-)
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Great idea! hopefully that will mean little or no light pollution coming from Shrewsbury obscuring my view of the nights sky when I look south east! @Observer what’s the matter scared of the dark?
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Let’s start with lights off at Tesco please.
Look at the megawats wasted on 24hrs shopping.
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i live in the countryside where there are no street lights anyway but my council tax bill is still huge. as for climate change, its been the coldest winter in 30 years, peaks and troughs! I dont belive a word of this climate change nonsense.
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Another hair brained idea from the council tax hikers. It would make far more sense to equip them with a solar panel on the top and a motion sensor switch. But then we are talking local government logic here.
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BACK TO THE DARK AGES I GUESS.
As a retired police officer who saw crime fall tremendously when street lighting was becoming to the level it is today, all I can say is that it does not take the brain of Briton to work out who will end up paying for this retrospective idea.
All of us! Watch this pace! Crime increased again! Why I wonder? What could possibly have caused this?
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fair play, they are not talking on the car parks or dangerous areas, clearly it will be on rural lanes which will actually be better off for not beign lit in terms of aesthetics, astronomy, wildlife and tranquility. Anything to save council tax is welcomed and somethign needs to be done to save money so, rather this than jobs losses and school closures hey
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Very good idea. But it will barely trouble the horrendous UK public finance deficit. If we really want to save serious money then lets see the public sector pensions gravy train unhitched and a sythe taken to the ‘diversity’ culture currently infecting our town halls.
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No.8, no I’m not scared of the dark, what a silly flippant comment, the same goes for No.5.
The majority of Shropshire wouldn’t notice a difference due to it’s rural demographics. But where there are large towns what about the safety of people such as ghe elderly who are already afraid to go out after dark, and that is with the street lighting on!
It is all about the right balance for everyone, not a certain group, plus to use climate change is a rather lame excuse to push through a cost saving idea. Why not say, we can’t afford to keep the street lighting on all the time? and we are running out of ideas!
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If the Government had half the sense it claims to have, it would make just half of all streetlights be turned off during darkness, thus leaving 50 per cent of light for safetys sake, and reducing our needs for power generation nationwide by a half.
That would eliminate the need for a few coal powered power stations to be fed by the likes of the coal that is currently actively being campaigned about in our district, and reduce our national import needs.
COTEYG
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Great idea, but what about an increase in crime (particularly vehicles) and on street accidents.
The lights are put there for a reason.
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Great! This is sensible,lets hope it will spread to all areas. We need to save money contribrute to the greener need of the world. We used to carry torches after dark, we can do this again.
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@ mark 10 – you clearly dont have a clue do you? like all things there is a heirarchy with energy best not to use it at all if possible, then if you do then use it efficiently, renewables is a last resort its emerging technology which is not yet economic. the cost of solar panels is rediculous, if the council was spending £5000 per lamp post installing PV you would be the first to complain
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By all means save money!
Disband all the climate quangos
But using the myth of climate change as an excuse is a bit rich.
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hayden 19 – I don’t know how long it takes for something to emerge in your world as solar technology has been around since the 1800s. LED technology is so advanced now that they are used in traffic lights and in the tailgate warning lights of modern cars. Couple that with the fact that they are cable free, you also have low cost maintenance. I fully agree with you regarding the energy hierarchy but given a logical solution I am all for pushing someone off their ivory tower.
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i support this plan but also save money on electricity at shirehall too its lit up like a christmas tree til late each night
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@8, When did Shrewsbury get electricity ???
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Drewp said:
“But using the myth of climate change as an excuse is a bit rich.”
Ah. But climate change aint a myth. Earth’s climate has always changed…….naturally.
What is worrying is the constant call to fight climate change i.e. stop a cycle that Ma Nature has been carrying out for millions of years. Yeah, that’s a really good thing, isn’t it
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all councils are doing this now times are hard, sounds sensible so long as its subject to risk assessment
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Could those saying climate change is a ‘myth’ explain why every major scientific institution in the world says it is very real and that mankind must respond to it as a matter of urgency?
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fair play to them i say im in bed from 11pm to 6pm every day so i dont need there to be light in the street if anything it keeps me awake
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In response to 13 (saving on council tax ?) I don’t think so, fortnightly refuse collections, recycling, supplying material for composting, I haven’t seen my tax come down, nor do I expect it to. Where does the money go that is raised by our recyling efforts ?
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A good idea in theory perhaps but the reality is likely to be somewhat different. Speaking as one of the four in ten car owners who have had their vehicle damaged by mindless vandal scum (not once, but three times), it seems obvious that such a scheme will only lead to more of the same. My car has been attacked whilst on my drive which is away from any street lighting. Coincidence? You work it out.
I would imagine that the criminal lowlifes and knuckle dragging morons, who only surface when darkness falls, will be rubbing their hands together in glee at the prospect. In addition, the pound signs are probably lighting up in the eyes of personal injury lawyers across the country in this compensation obsessed country of ours.
Time to get real folks. Anyone who thinks this will lead to lower council tax bills, or significant CO2 reductions, is I fear, sadly deluded.
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a sensible idea , i wish they would be more prudent with OUR money elsewhere too e.g. waste, water, printing, heating etc, the running costs of offices is massive and easy to make millions of pounds of savings
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Very unlikely that the government will ‘disband all the climate quangos’. After all, the old school tie is thicker than water.
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Well, first of all I don’t believe dimmer switches CAN be fitted to these type of lights. Secondly, I could agree with turning off 1 in every two street lights in Ellesmere after midnight, but total blackouts are unpopular and DO lead to increased minor crime and vandalism…. and what it the capital cost of retro-fitting this hardware? Saving money.. I don’t think so.
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Worked out how to save 50%++ …. buy electricity from the same source as Powys … do the maths, Powys appear to be able to operate a street light for half the price it costs Shropshire :)
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Surely a switching system of every other light off would be a fair compromise. As they are all on a timer system this surely would not incur any engineering costs?
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Huw Peach said:
“Could those saying climate change is a ‘myth’ explain why every major scientific institution in the world says it is very real and that mankind must respond to it as a matter of urgency?”
It’s a fair question.
But, these major scientific institutions, what datasets do they use? And are their GCM’s a paragon of computer programming excellence, that have been subject to totally independent peer review by programming experts outside of the climatology field?
31,000+ individual scientists say that the data has been selective at best, and that such data – combined with poorly written programs – results in GIGO.
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For information on the highly organised and -unfortunately- very successful campaign to deny the seriousness of climate change a good, up- to-date starting point might be: “Climate cover-up” (Greystone Books, 2009). This has info about the petition that winja mentions and the long history of climate science, which often anonymous bloggers are doing their utmost to discredit. The authors of this book are James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore.
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Another book which will unmask who is behind the climate change denial industry is …
‘Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming’ (Bloomsbury)
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway.
This is due out in mid-2010.
If you cannot wait until then I would watch Naomi Oreskes’ excellent video lecture on YouTube (See ‘Answering Climate Change Skeptics, Naomi Oreskes’), which gives a potted history of climate science going back to John Tyndall in the 19th century, Svante Arrhenius and Guy Callendar.
Interestingly Oreskes does NOT talk about who funds this handful of scientists, but more about their IDEOLOGY (laissez-faire, against government regulation).
That corresponds exactly to the people on the Shropshire Star site, who I have debated this issue with elsewhere on other threads.
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