FOI Request - Christmas Lights Funding

Request 101002891695

Please can I request the following information under FOI legislation.

Funding figures for Christmas lights in your local authority broken down for the last ten years.

Response 06/10/2021

Funding figures for Christmas lights in your local authority broken down for the last ten years is as follows:

Note: we only have figures from 2015 onwards:

2015 - £315.83
2016 - £247.91
2017 - £190.88
2018 - £186.85
2019 - £180.00
2020 - £200.00  

Christmas Lights - Elgin Bid and all the community councils supply, install and maintain the lights in their own towns at their own cost. We have been asked in the past to assist in the installation and removal of the lights but all costs have been recharged back to whichever community council have asked for our help.

The only involvement that we have is to do with the energy used.  We send out letters requesting energy usage and insurance documents. Once these come back we send the information to SSE who generate energy invoices and these are then sent out to the community councils with no added costs.  We estimate the cost for doing this between 2015-2020 as £3406.