Pembroke Terrace residents voice fury as road is closed for work by KCOM engineers

The owners of apartments and B&Bs in the area said the move was a major blow as they try to recover from the Covid pandemic, causing upset to both residents and their clients.

They also added that the work could have been done before the lockdown measures were lifted or held back until the summer season was finished to minimise disruption.

A spokesman said: “We were notified by a small sign that the road will be closed and there would be limited access to buildings from Thursday, June 3 for a number of weeks.

“As a business owner of holiday apartments, you can imagine how distressing this is for us.

“We were given four days’ notice, which in our opinion is not enough time for business owners to contact and arrange for our clients to either be refunded or be relocated to alternative accommodation.

“There’s no parking for either ourselves or our guests, and we will also have limited access to our building for our guests of which some are severely disabled and will need access for a wheelchair or electric scooter.

“We have only just been able to reopen our business after the horrendous Covid 19 restrictions and this has ruined the start of the season.

“The company doing the work is KCOM and we believe it is for non-essential upgrades.

“This could have been done during the past five months when we could not open or even wait until low season.”

A spokesperson for KCOM said: “We were given permission to carry out engineering works on Pembroke Terrace following a recent site visit with the East Riding of Yorkshire County Council’s street works team.

“However, we very much appreciate the needs of local businesses, especially after the challenging year they’ve had, and, after consultation with several local owners, changed our planned schedule of works to be outside of the recent school holidays.

“All works in Pembroke Terrace were due to be complete by Friday, June 11. We have also taking the decision to delay works in other similar ‘summer hot spot’ locations for the same reasons.

“We’re now in the process of moving works to less sensitive areas of the town and have reorganised our programme to accommodate this.

“As a company with roots stretching back more than 100 years throughout the region we will do everything we can to support local businesses and work in the best interests of the local community.

“We understand that street works will inevitably cause some disruption but we do what we can to minimise it. We believe that the long term gains from installing our award-winning full fibre broadband network far outweigh any short term disruption.”