In the Telegraph, Lauren Shirreff reports that Exeter is switching off its street lights to save money and the planet – but locals say it feels like a nightly curfew, with women in particular feeling unsafe getting home. Here’s how her article begins:
“It’s like having a curfew,” says Rose Lelliott, 23. Outside her flat, on a quiet road in Exeter – the sort of place you’d imagine your mother would encourage you to live, were you a young woman moving away from home for the first time – the street lights that once guided her way to the local train station are all either broken, working at half-power or permanently snuffed out.
Lelliott commutes to London once a week, where she works as a researcher at the House of Commons. To make the train for her 9am start, she has to be out the door by 5.15am, but the streetlamps along her road are turned off between 12.30pm and 5.30am. After 9.30pm, they’re dimmed to just 40% of their usual power.
Lelliott used to make the 20-minute journey on foot, “but I wouldn’t chance it now”, she says. So she spends £9 each way on taxi fares, on top of the cost of her return ticket. “I’m having to pay because I don’t feel safe,” she says, “but I’ve also heard from a woman who’s given up her job completely because she was doing shift work. She had to choose between financial independence and her own safety.”
This is a student city, but for many women here, a night on the town is now out of the question.
Rose Lelliott’s petition against the council’s street lighting cutbacks has received more than 1,500 signatures
Devon county council announced it was launching a trial of street lighting cutbacks at the end of 2024. “I started campaigning against it as soon as I heard about it, because I was really worried about the impact of poor street lighting for women and girls,” Lelliott says. It was announced this February that the changes would be made permanent. “I was just so frustrated. It really felt like the concerns of people living in the more urban parts of Devon, like Exeter, weren’t being taken seriously.”
A week later, Lelliott set up a new petition, calling for the council to hold off on its decision until it consulted women living across Devon on their views. It has already received more than 1,500 signatures, which Lelliott says would make it the largest that the council has ever received. Even the introduction of low-traffic neighbourhoods in Exeter in a 2023 trial did not stir so many locals to complain, she notes.
Well-lit streets are among the most basic of things we expect our councils to provide in return for the taxes we pay them, along with timely repairs to potholes (clearly amiss in Exeter too, judging by the state of the roads) and consistent garden waste collection (a privilege for which people living in the city pay an extra £50 a year, on top of their regular council tax bill).
Yet a growing number of councils across Britain are quietly scrapping night-time lighting. In Callington, Cornwall, the lights go off at midnight and only come back on at 5am, which is also the case in parts of Coventry and Yorkshire. So desperate is Britain’s financial predicament, it seems, that many councils can no longer deliver the bare minimum. Even Dan Thomas, who sits on Devon county council as a Liberal Democrat, and is responsible for looking after the highways and the street lights along them, will admit to that.
“Cost is undoubtedly a part of the mix,” he says. The permanent move has spread the outages across the whole of Devon, aside from a few small areas run by different unitary authorities. This makes Devon the biggest test case yet for similar policies that could be rolled out across the country. The lights go out slightly earlier in the less urbanised parts of Devon, staying on for slightly longer in Exeter than elsewhere, which Thomas says will keep Devon’s streets safe and fit for purpose. Across the entire area overseen by the council, Thomas says, the measure will save “£6 million annually, which is far from a drop in the bucket”.
Where will the money go? “The reality is that over the last 20 years or so, most available money that’s been floating around has been subsumed into adults and children’s services,” says Thomas. “Obviously, social care is such a demand-led and expensive part of what every council does these days.”
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