LED street lights have been installed in several roads in Kingsbridge over the past couple of weeks.

The work has seen new energy-efficient street lights and large posts erected in Church Street, Bridge Street, Duncombe Street and Belle Hill.

Devon County Council has been slowly upgrading lamp-posts across the county over the past couple of years in a £10.2m scheme. The funding followed a successful bid to the Department for Transport in 2015 to convert streetlights to lower wattage LED lighting, with about 5,000 columns being replaced as part of the project.

A Devon County Council spokesman said: “During this project in Kingsbridge, approximately 180 lanterns and 110 lamp columns are being replaced at a cost of around £100,000. By using more energy efficient lanterns and keeping part night lighting, the cost of energy used will reduce to a third of the existing costs, compared to the older lanterns, as well as help to bring down the county council’s carbon footprint.”

One rumour circulating Kingsbridge is that some of the lamp-posts replaced were only six months old, but DCC denied this.

The spokesman continued: “The instruction given to the contractor was to replace all the lamp columns which were older than 40 years old, according to our street lighting inventory records, apart from one lamp column found to be around 25 years old. This was replaced at the same time the main work was carried out in Church Street, to save closing the road in five years should that column fail a structural test. There were also a couple of columns between nine and 15 years old which only had the lanterns changed.”

“Throughout the street all the lanterns have been changed, which will cut down on future maintenance and contribute towards reducing the county council’s energy bill,” the spokesman added.

The next stage of the work will be to replace “deteriorated columns” in Belle Cross Road and Saffron Park, and convert the lights to LED lanterns.

DCC will be returning to the town in the late autumn to convert the Fore Street lamps to LEDs, and “review the condition of the posts for any damage”.

“The work in Kingsbridge will be ongoing as other deteriorated equipment becomes identified,” the DCC spokesman added.