Every year, £3,600 is awarded to each area partnership to meet the costs of creating and maintaining festive lighting – usually at a single location with the option to fund additional locations.
In Shettleston, lights are usually featured at Parkhead Cross and Shettleston Road and are expected to be lit there later in the year. Local councillors have also been working to secure more lights for future years.
However, the new Festive Lighting delivery programme is subject to a procurement exercise between 2025 and 2028, which means that the council was unable to produce the new pricing schedule in time for the area partnership meetings of August/September and it is not expected to be available until October 21.
The issue was discussed at Thursday’s meeting.
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Councillor Jill Pidgeon said: “The festive lighting set aside for Christmas lights and trees is £3,600 but I had hoped that we would have prices available so that we would be able to put some more Christmas lighting within the ward.
“I feel like we started this conversation on Boxing Day last year and we still won’t have that in place for this year. I don’t understand why it takes so long to get figures for having a Christmas tree in a park or lights on trees.
“We really need to push to have something in place earlier. In our ward, we only have lights on Parkhead Cross and Shettleston Road – it doesn’t seem like it’s right across the ward.
“I really did expect to have an understanding of how much the festive lights were across the ward.”
Councillor Thomas Kerr agreed that more lights were needed and he hoped they would be available by next Christmas. He also proposed a walk around the ward to spot potential sites for Christmas lights.
He said: “We had a long discussion at the previous area partnership meeting about looking for having a Christmas tree and Christmas lights at Wellshot Road and Tollcross Road.
“I know there was a discussion about having a walkabout. Do we have any further information on that taking place, I am keen to have one so we can get something in place for next year.”
