The Council is responsible for over 58,000 illuminated items on the public highway across the city. This includes streetlights on roads, redways and footways, lit bollards and signs, school wigwags, pedestrian crossings and underpasses.

There is no legal requirement to light the highway including residential roads. Under the Highways Act 1980, the Council as the highway authority for Milton Keynes, have the power to install and maintain lighting, but are not legally required to do so. 

However, where we have chosen to install lights for safety, we do need to maintain them in a safe condition and there are minimum lighting levels required to light the highway.

Repairing Illuminated Items

We use our Code of Practice to determine how and when our illuminated items are checked and repaired. Timeframes for these repairs are also included in this document but these are also set out in our Service Statment:

We promise to...

• provide a street lighting service as set out in our Code of Practice for street lighting maintenance
• carry out visual checks after dark of all street lights on grid roads, redways and underpasses each month so that any lighting issues are identified, logged and repairs scheduled in
• respond to reports of street lighting faults in all other areas
• provide a 24-hour service and will attend to emergencies within 2 to 24 hours
• aim to repair a ‘light out’ within 14 days of reporting or for a single light out on a grid road, 28 days*
• carry out structural and electrical testing of street lights annually

*This includes minor repairs. For larger or more complex faults such as cabling or power supply issues, this is likely to take much longer. We may need to ask the energy supplier to disconnect the supply before we can do any works on a light or feeder pillar and they will need to schedule this. To find out more about cabling faults.

Maintenance Programmes

Most repairs can be carried out within the timeframes as set out above, however much of the lighting cable across the city is around 40 years old and is pas the end of its operational life. Sections of cable are failing causing sections of lights to go out. 

Cable faults are more complex repairs to do and can cost several thousand to identify, repair and replace. This means we can't do all the cable faults in one financial year and we use a Priority Matrix to plan our works.

The Priority Matrix looks at where the highest risk to the public is on the highway.

The grid network has the highest speed limits and the largest traffic volumes so these are our top priority.

2026/2027 Streetlighting Schemes

We will be working on these sections over the next few months where there are cable faults:

Underpass Maintenance