A WIRRAL councillor has branded, what he calls, the authority’s failure to keep up with street lighting repairs a ‘disgrace’.

Figures obtained by Oxton Liberal Democrat Cllr Stuart Kelly show a 63% fall in the number of reported street light faults.

Fault detection in the past was carried out during the fortnightly patrols that covered all of the borough’s lighting stock.

But this service was cut from the authority’s budget as part of austerity measures in February 2013.

Since then, members of the public have been relied on to report defective street lights to Streetscene.

But according to Cllr Kelly this has been less than successful, as it is estimated that 10% of the borough’s lighting is defective.

Councillor Kelly will call for the restoration of patrols during the budget meeting of Wirral Council on Tuesday night.

He said: "Everywhere we look there are street lights unlit, often in groups of three or four.

"This is a disgrace and a mockery of the Labour cabinet’s claim to care about anti social behaviour if they are prepared to accept this level of darkness on our streets.

"It is currently estimated that one in every ten street lights in the Wirral is unlit.

“This crisis can be directly linked to the ill-thought out decision to remove night time patrols and rely entirely on reports to Street scene by the public.

"Recently the cabinet member for highways told the press there had been unprecedented numbers of lights reported out”

"However the figures show that fewer lights are reported out than ever before.

"And the sad fact is that in October the cabinet were told of the crisis but chose to do nothing about it opting instead to keep us in the dark.”

Councillor Stuart Whittingham, cabinet member for highways, said: “We are committed to keeping all street lights in the borough operational.

"Indeed, we are currently investing in replacing our most inefficient and expensive street lights with new LED units and introducing a new central management system which will give us greater control over lights and also automatically identify faults, which means they can be repaired faster.

“We have a very successful partnership with BAM Nuttall to assist us with all aspects of highway maintenance but recently we noticed that the demand was impacting on their ability to meet response times on street lighting.

"We asked them to take action to address this and they are doing. I’d just ask people to be patient while they put in the necessary arrangements to deal with the current backlog, while still moving forward with helping us implement our new street lighting strategy.”