A CORONER vowed to try and halt the council’s policy of turning off street lights after hearing how a man was run over on a pitch-black road in the middle of a village.

An inquest in Chelmsford today (Thursday) heard how 31-year-old businessman Grant Barry was killed by a Land Rover down the road from his home in Tysea Hill, Stapleford Abbotts, after spending the evening at a concert.

After spending the evening at a Michael Buble tribute concert at Woolston Manor Golf Club, Chigwell, his friends saw Mr Barry into a cab after deciding he was too drunk to stay out.

Taxi driver David Walters, who picked him up from the club shortly after midnight, said he had been drunk and confused about where he was going.

“He was quite intoxicated, but at the same time, he didn’t look a threat,” he said. “I said ‘I need to know where you’re going’.

“We passed the Royal Oak pub (in Stapleford Abbotts) and out of the blue, he said ‘here’.”

The inquest saw CCTV footage of Mr Barry leaning on the gates of a house near the pub after he had been dropped off and swaying as he crossed the road.

Joanne Joy, 40, was driving the Land Rover Freelander that hit Mr Barry as he was lying in the road at about 1am.

She said she and her husband Simon had been visiting his parents in Stapleford Abbotts with their children, then aged five and nine, and she was driving home along the pitch black road at about 30 mph.

“I didn’t see anything in the road, then at the last second, for a split second, I saw dark mark,” she said. “The car went over it and I stopped on the road. Simon, my husband, went to have a look.”

She said Mr Joy came back to the car and told her she had hit a person.

Crash scene investigator Pc Stephen Burton said Mrs Joy would have to have been travelling at 17 mph to have stood a chance of stopping before she hit Mr Barry.

“That’s subject to her identifying him as a body,” he added. “Should a motorist reasonably expect that a person will be lying in the road ahead of them?”

He added that although surrounding homes had lights in their gateways, they were not directed at the road.

Giving a verdict of accidental death, coroner Eleanor McGann said: “This is a residential area. Why on earth is there no street lighting at all?

“Essex County Council’s new policy of turning the lights off in built-up areas to save money and perhaps to save the environment is inherently dangerous when you look at cases like this.”

She said she would write to the council and advise it to review its policy and the matter of street lighting in Stapleford Abbotts.