The long way round (From York Press)

And our council tax pays for their transport, wages, tools, spares, their bosses bonus, shareholders dividends, christmas night out......
But, if it wasn't like that then the council would have to employ more people and nobody likes a drain on resources such as a public sector worker.

Councils have to tender for work, and if a firm from miles away puts in the lowest bid and meets all the contract requirements then they have little alternative but to go with that firm

The chap who came from Newcastle works for N.E.D.L they are this areas' power supplier and only their workforce can work on their equipment.
The replacement lam posts would have erected by CYC' s contractor Amey who at that time had their depot In Poppleton, ( those lads could have walked and brought the columns on their shoulders !)

A little bit of misguided information can be dangerous.

Another point, lots of people moaned about the removal of unsafe lamppost, has there been any positives comments about the way the replacement programme has been carried out?
From what I've seen they have done a good job.

Just a thought

^ you beat me to it. Amey does not have a depot in Newcastle. When there is a bulk load of work required (such as the recent concrete column replacements around the city) extra crews are drafted in from Wakefield who are used to PFI work and so can sweep an area with some speed. At one point during the works there was two HIAB cranes in Haxby pulling out old columns and another one over in Elvington area planting new ones, in addition to two vans putting lanterns on the new columns.

The job described in the letter will have required the supply to be isolated, and because it is unswitched only qualified jointers such as those NEDL use (or another company, NDS, which is part of Amey and was used during the bulk works) are legally allowed to even touch these live cables, and so if there are no qualified persons locally who can attend an emergency callout, then somebody will have to be called in from where ever possible. If the old columns either fail above or can be cut above the access door section, Amey can do this and leave the stumps until a new column is connected.... if the base section is badly damaged the work has to be outsourced, I believe, from what I have seen.

I think the new lighting that has gone up over the past year or so is doing the job well. My only thought is that on some roads such as Stonebow where a new column has gone up, the new lantern runs a sodium light whilst the others were converted to white light, and so we get a nice white road with a random orange patch.