Health and safety concerns have led a council to cancel Windermere’s Christmas lights display this year.
Windermere and Bowness Town Council took over the role of putting up this year’s lights in the Lake District town after a volunteer group, which had been doing the job for the previous decade, pulled out.
The volunteers said they had warned the council that they did not have enough grant money to continue before the local authority took over the job.
Health and safety defects were uncovered when contractors hired by the council inspected anchor points for the lights.
Nicola Hastie, one of the volunteer group’s organisers, told the BBC she had “absolutely loved” helping to organise Christmas lights events, which also included a parade, over the last 10 years.
‘More complicated than we imagined’
She blamed rising costs and said “it was not sustainable” to continue, but added that the group did not feel it had had enough support from the council.
Ms Hastie added that she hoped the absence of lights this ear would make the council and residents take the issue more seriously because the parade and lights came as “a package”.
Sally Parkyn, the town clerk, told the BBC that volunteers had not raised concerns about funding and said that, when the council took on the job, health and safety regulations made it “more complicated than we imagined”.
“If you’re a volunteer, you can probably do things in a way that you can’t as a professional company,” she said, adding that time to fix the problem by Christmas had run out.
Mrs Parkyn said the town council would start to plan for next year’s lights in January and she was “100 per cent” confident they would return next Christmas.