NEIGHBOURS have been left in the dark as to why streetlights in three roads have than more than a month to fix.

The lights went out in Charlton, Wantage on December 11 across three neighbours streets – Paddock Close, Truelocks Way and Barnards Way.

John Leake, who lives in Paddock Close, went onto website fixmystreet.com to report the problem and discovered a note left by the street lighting team at Oxfordshire County Council saying it was not their problem and might take the council's contractor SSE up to 60 days to fix.

A former neutron detector designer at Harwell, 78-year-old Mr Leake is no stranger to problem-solving but said he was baffled by SSE's slow-moving staff.

Mr Leake, who lives with his wife Pamela, said: "The council washed their hands of it and it's bloody dark up here if you go out at night without a torch.

"It's great for looking at the stars but you're in serious danger of tripping over and I don't think it's good enough.

"It's like living in a third world country."

The county's street lighting team posted a message on fixmystreet.com on Friday, December 16, saying they had visited the site, and marked the problem up as 'not the council's responsibility'.

An officer wrote: "Thank you for your report, we have attended site and found this to be a supply fault.

"Unfortunately any power failure due to cable/ supply fault is outside the control of Oxfordshire County Council and has to be dealt with by the local electricity supply company Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE).

"These faults may take between 10 and 60 working days to repair, depending on their staff resources and how serious the fault is."

Mr and Mrs Leake, who have lived in Paddock Close for 30 years, said they were not so much worried for their own safety as some of their elderly neighbours.

Mr Leak said: "It's one thing if you chose to live out in the countryside but when you move to a built-up place you expect street lighting.

"At this time of year there is not a lot going on in the evenings but it's nice to have them there – we are paying for them after all."

A spokesman for SSE said the company was only made aware of the problem on January 6 and that it 'has a 20-working day window to carry out repairs'.

However Oxfordshire County Council spokesman Martin Crabtree confirmed the council had reported the matter to SSE on December 14.

He explained: "We received notification from SSE on January 4 that the fault had been fixed, however a resident informed us on January 5 that the lights were not on or had gone off again and so we reissued the request to SSE on January 6."