THIS man has spent three years fighting his local council over broken streetlights – and his battles include hundreds of emails sent, photographs taken and hours spent cycling around the borough to inspect them.

Wirral resident Simon Gong is furious the council claims to be replacing every single street light in the borough with new “state-of-the-art” LEDs by 2021, and says of the hundreds he has reported to the authority, only a few dozen have actually been fixed.

The council said repairs are made on a “priority basis”, and can take longer to do, particularly when cable faults are found.

But Mr Gong, who works as a tour guide, said it’s a “disgrace”, and has raised fears over safety on “pitch black streets”, with the situation worsening each day.

He began monitoring the streetlights in 2016, and in his view, there are “almost 500” broken lamps in Wallasey and Birkenhead alone. He went along to speak at a full council meeting in December and vent his fury at what he callas the “reprehensibly inept” authority.

Mr Gong, 53, said: “I don’t even think you can appreciate just how exasperating, infuriating and downright demoralising it has been to keep on doing this month after month and year after year – only to still have no progress made on these key locations. It’s as if they are almost deliberately playing mind games with me.

“It’s been a monumental effort. I have been putting myself out there. I haven’t got the time for this, but I make the time.”

He’s taken to posting notices to the council on the lamp posts themselves, complaining at the lack of action, and also has a log book of the streetlights he’s reported – and whether or not they’ve been fixed.

He added: “I’m coming at this from a safety perspective too. Some streets are really dangerous and pitch black.

“Having already wasted three years of my life – over 1,000 days – getting them to sort out the urgent repair of this never-ending backlog of broken lamps since I first logged them on their website in April 2016, it’s an absolute disgrace and travesty to discover that they have only actually managed to repair and replace about 30 of the 400 plus so far.

“My list, which gets updated every week, seems to have been completely ignored if you take the trouble to consult their website to check the roads and locations of – allegedly – every single fault that is reported to the council.

“In fact, if you were to take this list into consideration, they have actually only addressed about 12 of the locations, which is beyond belief. The rest, tellingly, are roads and streets which are not on my ‘hit list’.”

He said the authority is “simply incapable” of communicating with him “in a prompt and timely” way, adding that it has “made me so angry at this current disgraceful fiasco which shows no signs of being addressed in a satisfactory manner”.

According to Mr Gong, he’s sent more than 120 emails to the council since 2016, made around 240 phone calls, and contacted local councillors, MPs and the local government ombudsman too, but said so far, he’s been “fobbed off”.

Last year, the council announced its intention to repair and upgrade every street light in the borough – more than 27,000 – as part of “record investment”.

But in Mr Gong’s view, the council has been more focused on repairing and replacing lights in “more affluent areas instead of poorer neighbourhoods” like Wallasey and Birkenhead.

He said their priorities are “skewed”, raising one example of his point – Sheen Road in New Brighton.

That road is made up of large, semi-detached houses. Mr Gong said all four lights were still working when they were replaced with new LED lamps last year. But he said adjoining Penkett Road had “six” broken lights, two of which have not been repaired or replaced for “four years”, adding: “Why haven’t they been fixed in all this time?”

A council spokeswoman said: “More than 1,000 street lights in Wirral have been replaced with new LED lights as part of our ongoing programme of work to modernise and improve the borough’s street lighting network. Our aim is to have as many of Wirral’s street lights as possible replaced by 2021, with many lamp posts also planned to be replaced as part of this work.

“Street lighting repairs are made on a priority basis, with highest priority being given to faults presenting the greatest risk. In instances where a cable fault has been found underground, where the intervention of Scottish Power is required, this can unfortunately make the repair time longer.

“Reported faulty street lights that are already planned for replacement in the near future will be replaced as scheduled in the programme and in circumstances where these street lights are ‘out’ in priority areas they will be prioritised in line with priority protocol.

“If you have noticed a street light is out or in need of repair, please report it here: https://ww3.wirral.gov.uk/HILight/Scripts/ServiceRequestMain.asp.”