Just when you thought it was safe to go back down Handford Road, BT is bringing traffic to halt again.

In May we revealed that the county council had been informed of 14 occasions when the road needed to be partially closed over the previous six months – the main culprit is BT which has its telephone exchange nearby.

Now it has told the authority that the road will need to be partially closed again for a week from last night - the 15th time in the past eight months.

Traffic will be controlled 24 hours a day by four-way lights until next Wednesday.

A spokesman for BT said: “BT are replacing damaged cable from the junction of Portman Road and Handford Road, Ipswich. Openreach engineers will work as quickly as they can to complete the work as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.”

The work has been logged with Suffolk, but no one from the county council – which is in partnership with BT to introduce better broadband – was able to comment on the likely problems.

Ipswich MP Ben Gummer said he would be writing to BT to find out why they kept closing the same piece of road: “Surely they could run their cables through a tunnel or something to avoid having to cause all this disruption so often,” he said.

Meanwhile less than a year after The Street at Rushmere St Andrew was closed for months during major rebuilding, it is shut again – this time for drainage works.

While the road is closed a new pavement is being created to make it easier for pedestrians to cross The Street near the Baptist Chapel.

A council spokesman said it would not have been possible to do this work at the same time as last year’s because that would have cut off access completely to some properties. The work is scheduled to be completed by the end of next week.