Roads and Streetlighting

We've had a number of people raising the long-standing issue of poor street-lighting, signage and road conditions across the site.

As many of you know, the residents assocation has been trying to get improvements for over a year,

To give some history on this, we met Royale senior management on 18 July 2022 and raised concerns over poorly maintained infrastructure. The company agreed to work to put things right. However, nothing seemed to change so we commissioned our own report on the state of roads/pavements/street lighting. This was delivered to the office on 8 October 2022 but once again, nothing substantial changed.

We wrote to Royale head office again and their Operations Manager responded by saying she’d arrange for their H&S manager to visit the site ‘in the coming weeks’ to write a report which would be shared with the association but to date, that’s never been done.

We got fed up asking Royale so we esculated the matter to the council. Ultimately, Royale has an obligation under their licence to keep the site safe and well lit at night so on 22 January 2023 we approached Basildon Council who enforce the license.

When the council looked over the licence for Dunton they discovered is was completly out of date (it should have been renewed when Royale took over the site) so their licence team told us they would need to go over it completely and renew it. This would mean lots of visits to the site as they check everything is in order.

We know the licencing officer has been on site measuring pitches but - nearly a year later - little else seems to have progressed in terms of roads and lighting. So, we now have an email history of complaints to Royale AND Basildon Council! And almost 12 months on and still no sign of a renewed licence. We've even resorted to freedom of information requests to get hold of correspondence between the council and Royale Head Office because we don't believe the council are pulling their weight and doing their job properly.

Now, with the site in administration, it's another level of frustration in our battle to sort this out. As residents can see, this has been a long-standing issue and we're doing all we can to get improvements. Please bear with us, we won't give up.