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At SocietyWorks we run a service for local authorities called WasteWorks, one part of which includes, alongside bulky collections, garden subscriptions and the like, the important service of finding out when your bin days are (speaking as someone who hasn’t had a recycling collection in 18 months due to the Birmingham bin strike).

I was recently reading Tom Loosemore’s blog post about AI agents (meaning LLM-powered services operating browsers directly or requesting things from websites, notionally on someone’s behalf), and his previous post about being “beaten” by council websites when trying to make a national bin day site (due to the variations in council websites being too much for his attempt), and got to thinking – AI agents can be useful to individuals, but using them in this way is collectively causing problems, and we need to keep the focus on improving and fixing the plumbing that helps us deliver sustainable digital services.

Tom’s Bluesky post led to a number of follow-on discussions about bins:

• Tom Steel mentioned localgovdrupal’s bin module, which acts in a similar way to our own sites, and would let councils that use localgovdrupal more easily add a bin day section to their site – a win for collaborative and shared working;
• Phil Rumens and Paul Connell had a discussion about data publishing and a previously proposed waste data standard that wasn’t adopted;
• And Rachel 🦁 via Owen Boswarva linked to the UKBinCollectionData project.

The last of those is especially interesting, as it is an existing way of getting the data Tom was trying to, with collaborative (169 contributors so far) open source software, and it even handles the one (Westminster Council) that stumped Tom’s AI fine. It integrates with Home Assistant, if you use that, and could presumably be used as a base for other things. It may be boring, compared to the thought of a magic-seeming “agent”, but scrapers/agents that accept instructions from what they read, where there is no privileged set of instructions or separation of data, are fundamentally risky (e.g. “Word worm crawls into Copilot”) compared to a script using and reading an open standard.

Meeting user needs in a simple, sustainable way

I wonder whether people actually would want a single national service to look up their bin days. They just want to find out when their bin day is, and I wouldn’t search for a special app/site for that. People might go on their council website (it’s printed on the bin), they might search, they might ask AI (though Google’s AI overview being asked when is your bin day currently says “use the council tool” but asks for your postcode(!), then says “use the council tool” but still asks for your precise address(!!), and then says… “use the council tool”), they might (shock) ask their neighbour – but what’s needed by all of those is for the data to be available in some manner for all these routes to use, which doesn’t need consolidation.

All WasteWorks bin day pages publish iCal feeds (.ics files) of collections, an old (RFC 2445 was in 1998) data standard for publishing calendar events. They can all utilise UPRNs, the UK data standard for uniquely referencing properties (though in some places for performance reasons we use other property identifiers). They all have nice, bookmarkable URLs, so people can save their bin day page in their bookmarks, or as a progressive web app, if that’s how they want to get the information.

In terms of standards, I think a good role of the centre is to provide platforms and ways for things to operate, and inter-operate, as we talk about in our paper Unlocking the value of fragmented public data. In this case, for example, they could recommend that councils provide such iCal feeds for bin day pages, so people, scripts, or agents don’t have to parse HTML web pages or PDFs; they could propose a URL standard for the location of a bin day page via UPRN, so automation could locate them more easily (https://www.gov.uk/rubbish-collection-day already exists, at a less automated level, for example). Backend systems can’t publish all the data, and I’m not sure we need them to, but locating that information is what people want to do, and we then surface what we can.

The tragedy of the commons

However, we also, like many others, are under increased constant barrage by badly written AI bots (perhaps running off your cheap streaming stick). Be that for scraping for training data, bots trying to find security holes, or people making badly written apps to look up information on a large scale, such activity can potentially cause knock-on issues for actual users of the site. And if everyone is doing the same thing, wasting resources over and over, with no thought to the collective benefit or disbenefit, then we find ourselves in a tricky situation.

My colleague Alex talks about 3 types of state interaction in the context of AI-driven demand – private benefit (for the requestor, e.g. a grant, or a benefit application), collective benefit (benefits the requester and wider society, e.g. a public FOI request, or reporting a pothole), or a zero-sum interaction (e.g. planning). Getting a script, or AI agent, or whatever today’s buzzword is to fetch bin day information is a private benefit, whilst having some shared code on GitHub helps turn that into a collective benefit. And having easily usable bin day pages with iCalendar feeds helps increase the collective benefit.

In that vein, I have submitted a Pull Request to the UKBinCollectionData project to switch to using our iCal feeds for all the council bin day pages we run, rather than the various more brittle web scraping that they currently use, which should help both users and us, providing more data, in a more performant manner. This I feel is how we best deliver what people want – when is bins?

Bin photo CC-BY, by David Merrett

After decades of technological progress, it is no secret that today’s technology acts as a mirror to human bias. Take this famous case in the US as an example, in which risk assessments used by the police to predict future criminals were resulting in an inaccurate prediction of reoffence for black Americans. ProPublica’s analysis of a series of such cases sparked outrage across the globe, with people expressing disapproval of the use of algorithms in justice calculations, where the decision could have a significant impact on people’s lives. 

Whilst EnviroWorks, our private and secure environmental health reporting and case management system, does not use algorithms to make decisions on case prioritisation or issuing Community Protection Notices (CPNs), cases such as these show how technological systems can reflect bias and have significant consequences for marginalised groups. In our design, we wanted to be sure that we understood – and thus could prevent – the possible unintended consequences of our environmental health reporting tool. 

As EnviroWorks could involve the collection of personally identifiable information (PII), including video, voice or images of people and their homes, we knew there could be privacy concerns. As a long-time provider of reporting and civic engagement services, we were confident we could manage this risk effectively (see the end of the blog post for our design principles).

Our main concern with this service was that it could include people-reporting-on-people, meaning that biases and prejudices could play a part in reporting. By making it easier for people to report, we didn’t want to inadvertently increase reports against marginalised, vulnerable, or minority groups. We didn’t want technology to play a part in reflecting or amplifying existing human bias. 

In this blog, we detail our concerns around the ethics of this service, the findings of our research, and the guardrails we put in place to manage risk.

Understanding the risks

Environmental reports, particularly those related to noise and smell complaints, can cause divisions within communities. Reports are often social and moral judgements rather than objective facts – i.e. not just “I hear a noise” but “my neighbour is being inconsiderate or unreasonable”. They can therefore be wrapped up in a person’s opinions and biases. 

As such, marginalised and low income groups are more likely to be the subject of reports about antisocial behaviour (ASB) and environmental health concerns. There is a notable absence of research on who is reported and the consequences of such reporting, though news stories abound where minority groups are reported on for ostensibly routine activities, such as having small social gatherings or playing music. 

A few studies suggest that cities with diverse ethnicities and religions and more deprived cities and regions receive more nuisance complaints. A 2013 University of Glasgow study showed how complaint systems can disproportionately target groups whose presence is viewed as socially undesirable, such as young people. 

According to research by the Housing Ombudsman, most noise reports can be better categorised as daily household noise, rather than being antisocial in nature. This shows how subjective reports can be.

Pursuing EnviroWorks as a democratic function

The issues of subjectivity and discrimination were at the forefront of our minds when developing EnviroWorks. The prospective tool would be people-reporting-on-people, as well as on “things”, adding a type of reporting that is different from our existing street, highway and environment fault reporting service, FixMyStreet. We were concerned that giving people the ability to more easily report certain environmental health issues, like noise or nuisance behaviour, could risk the further marginalisation of the already marginalised groups who are most often the subjects of such reports.

Local authorities have guidance for staff on dealing with environmental health reports fairly, including strict standard operating procedures and enforcement policies. For us, it was vital to ensure that the reporting mechanism itself does not create opportunities for unfair reporting, but rather assists council staff to best ensure fairness in case management. 

Councils have a statutory duty to protect public health and the environment by investigating issues that could impact health or become a nuisance, so people have the right to report and to have their reports addressed.  We knew that, if done well and fairly, a reporting tool could be a useful democratic function. Balancing this duty with the risks, the SocietyWorks team recognised the need for extra care in design, to ensure the service aligns with our aims to help the public sector better serve citizens, without unfairly favouring or excluding any group.

Putting the right guardrails in place

We had a good understanding of the potential consequences of noise reporting, based on a consequence scanning exercise we conducted in 2020. Through an exercise with Hackney Council staff during the development of NoiseWorks (the precursor to EnviroWorks), we were able to look at the positives and negatives from the different viewpoints of council staff, citizens and the wider community. Revisiting this work as we explored the development of EnviroWorks, this exercise helped us to understand what mitigations should be put into place.

As we developed our design principles, we integrated intelligence from desk research into environmental health reporting, including expertise from Freedom in Every Day Life on the current approaches to CPNs. CPNs are often issued in response to environmental and ASB reports and can have a detrimental effect on the subject of the report, such as stress. We followed their guidance, which aims to ensure that powers are used fairly, impartially, and proportionately.

Bringing together the findings from our consequence scanning with best practice from the experts, we solidified our understanding of how best to design a tool that suited the needs of case managers in local authorities, as well as the needs of reporters and report subjects. This process brought us to a set of design principles to act as guardrails and mitigate against risks of harm.

Design principles for EnviroWorks

1. Informal resolution. Recognising that the service is serving a statutory function, we wanted to ensure that people are able to report, but are not encouraged to report. By signposting to Citizens Advice, providing advice on mediation and informal resolution, and providing information on what isn’t a statutory issue, citizens have the information they need to make an informed decision on whether a report is appropriate and necessary. A reduction in reports can reduce unnecessary reporting against minorities and marginalised groups, and reduces the burden on already stretched environmental health teams. This benefits councils, the subjects of the reports, reporters, and has broader benefits for the social fabric of the community.
2. Accountability. In the fully-private, back-end case management system, all actions, decisions and reasoning are documented. This provides a full evidence trail for oversight.
3. Transparency. The case management system prompts council staff to update reporters and people being reported on. It is vital that both sides are updated, with the subjects of reports given rights of appeal information. The system also makes it easy to generate statistics, which allows staff to understand where reports are happening and identify clusters or trends. As our software is open source, a public repository provides publicly accessible information on what types of information is being collected and how it is processed.
4. Proportionality and due process. Prompts in the case management system encourage a problem solving approach. Staff are reminded to give informal warnings, communicate with the person who is the subject of the report, and provide them with the right to appeal. Prompts will be developed alongside the local authority’s own due process. 
5. Objectivity. When issuing formal Community Protection Warning (CPW) or Community Protection Notice (CPN), Officers could be provided with statutory guidance on objectivity from the Home Office and Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (as recommended by Manifesto Club). Complementing the council’s own guidance, this would support staff to engage with reports objectively.
6. Accessibility. As with all SocietyWorks products, EnviroWorks follows high standards of web accessibility. Our digital services are all WCAG 2.2 AA compliant, as per W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. For example, we use clear language and ensure a simple user interface and provide information on alternative contact points e.g. telephone. EnviroWorks is a Progressive Web App, meaning the user does not need to download an app, but can use it in their browser. This makes it more accessible for people with older devices or wanting to work in a browser.
7. Personal data collection and access minimisation.  Reports are fully private on EnviroWorks. Personal data is subject to strict technical and contractual scope limitation, with data protection agreement clauses strictly scoped to environmental health reporting, data retention and anonymisation policy. We operate on a principle of requiring the least amount of data access necessary to do the job.

As with all of our tools, we will be learning with each new implementation and tailoring the system to meet specific needs of each local authority we work with. We’ll be back with case studies and lessons learned as we have them! 

Are you in need of a better environmental health reporting and case management service?

If you’d like to find out more about EnviroWorks, or any other aspect of the SocietyWorks local government suite, then please contact us through our online form.

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Image: Robin Vintevogel on Unsplash

Following some work completed in collaboration with Merton Council, it is now possible to apply discount schemes to bulky waste services through WasteWorks.

As with all features of WasteWorks, this new functionality can be modified to accommodate different councils’ individual workflows and charging models.

For example, Merton came to us with a request to be able to offer a free bulky waste collection to properties meeting a specific criteria (in this case: no free collection used within the past 12 months and 3 or fewer items) through its WasteWorks service.  

To facilitate this without the need for any manual intervention from council staff, we configured WasteWorks to be able to store and validate the last used free bulky collection date on a per-property basis, and check how many items were included within the booking. If both conditions are met, the discounted booking can proceed, otherwise the standard chargeable workflow applies.

In instances where a bulky collection is amended by staff and items are added to a free bulky collection that cause the collection to exceed 3 items, then the booking is turned into a “paid for” collection, charged the standard fee set by the council, and the free collection remains available to use later.

Also in-keeping with the Merton’s criteria, if residents cancel their free booking 7 or more days before the scheduled collection date, the free booking will be made available for later use, but a cancellation less than 7 days before the scheduled date will mark the free collection as used.

After placing a free collection booking, WasteWorks will send a confirmation email to residents, plus regular reminder emails to help minimise missed collections and avoidable contact.

Similarly, Merton also wanted to be able to easily change the criteria for a free/discounted bulky waste collection. To enable this, we added some new sections to WasteWorks’ admin interface.

Now, when logged into WasteWorks, council staff with the appropriate permissions can turn the discount scheme on and off, modify the number of months allowed between discounted collection dates, set the number of items allowed, and set the price of a free/discounted collection.

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In addition to discount schemes, WasteWorks also helps councils handle a variety of other pricing changes associated with waste services. Read more in this blog post, or contact us for a demo. 

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Image: Christine Blanchet on Pexels

With more decisions on Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) announced, councils across the UK are going to need to navigate some complex adjustments of responsibilities as they assume different structures. 

Even for those not directly affected by LGR, any change taking place in neighbouring boroughs could have an impact, such as boundary changes making it harder for members of the public to know who’s responsible for an issue.

At SocietyWorks, we’ve been helping councils through various structural transitions with our technology for over 20 years, and have already been supporting some of our clients through changes associated with LGR. 

Take a look at some of the ways we’ve been doing this…

Keeping the front-end simple and consistent 

While LGR is a big topic among the public sector, nearly two thirds of the public are not engaged with what is happening. Regardless of how much change is afoot, members of the public will still want to do things like check when their bin is being collected, submit an application for a skip licence or tell the council about a pothole — quickly, easily and without confusion.

During Northamptonshire County Council’s unitary transition into North Northamptonshire Council and West Northamptonshire Council, we helped to keep the reporting of local street and highway defects simple. We did this by running a combined service capable of triaging between the two new councils until each was ready to launch their own instance of the service, each of which is still capable of ensuring reports go to the right place across the county and beyond its borders.

Absorbing and redistributing responsibilities

Where reorganisation involves redistributing responsibilities, it’s essential to keep data flows smooth to reinforce trust and prevent failure demand. 

Take the work we completed with Buckinghamshire Council following its transition to unitary status which made it possible to automatically triage reports to its town and parish councils and gave them the ability to respond to users to keep the feedback loop closed. This enabled residents to see continuity in service delivery even when governance changed.

Our new FixMyStreet for Parish & Town Councils offering builds on this work, giving the smallest of councils the ability to define which types of street issue they are responsible for, and then receive email notifications when local residents report issues in those categories via FixMyStreet.

Meanwhile, for other authorities needing to change the types of reports they receive or alter the services they offer, our flexible solutions are designed to accommodate this — whether it’s as simple as adding new categories for public realm fault reporting or as intensive as incorporating whole new waste services into the council’s remit. 

Bridging gaps and smoothing switchovers

The interoperability of our solutions ensures that our council clients can make whatever changes are required behind the scenes, enabling you to restructure without disrupting the citizen-facing side of the process.

This is something we helped the Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames and the London Borough of Sutton with while they navigated a full in-cab system switchover. Using their respective instances of our front-end WasteWorks portal, users could still check bin days, report issues and manage their waste needs just like before. This meant that while internal integrations and workflows evolved, the public interface stayed consistent and predictable.

A considered approach to change

LGR represents a moment of real change for councils and, critically, the people they serve. While this scale of change won’t be without its challenges, where councils make use of technology that can accommodate individual needs, disruption can be kept to a minimum.

We know how to support councils to achieve sustainable digital transitions that create impactful transformation in public service delivery. If you would like some help navigating LGR through citizen-centred technology, get in touch with us and we’ll  do our best to help. 

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Image: Nicolas Postiglioni on Pexels

Dudley Council has selected SocietyWorks’ FixMyStreet Pro solution as its new platform for the reporting of street and highway problems, complete with integration with the Symology Insight asset management system.  

With an immediate priority to improve the way pothole reports are managed, the service will be launched for Dudley in phases, the first of which will cover only pothole reporting. A wider service, incorporating other highway fault categories, will be rolled out over the coming months.  

Dudley’s FixMyStreet Pro service will be integrated with its existing asset management system Symology Insight, with updates shared to and from each system whenever a report’s status changes to close the feedback loop.  

Existing reports will be shown on the map, with potential duplicates suggested to users for them to subscribe to instead of re-reporting. 

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said: “Potholes represent an enormous and ongoing challenge for the public sector, so it’s essential that authorities can access intuitive and responsible technology that enables them to respond to reports from members of the public in an accessible, cost-effective and sustainable way.

“It’s wonderful to have Dudley’s trust in delivering this project at pace, harnessing the flexibility of FixMyStreet Pro to focus on specific service areas before adopting further categories into the platform to unlock further transformative impact.”

WasteWorks, our front-end solution for local authority waste services, launched in 2021. It was born out of the realisation that residential (and later commercial) waste services would also benefit from our simple yet effective citizen-centred design approach. While most councils already had some form of digital offering for managing waste at this time, we were seeing time and again how many of the existing processes and systems were creating contact that was avoidable if only the technology could be as adaptive and interoperable as the waste industry requires it to be.

When we first started to scope out the key pain points WasteWorks needed to resolve for councils and for citizens, missed collections and the administrative burden associated with them were right up there among the top priorities. 

In the first instance, how can we help residents and commercial waste clients to avoid missing a collection? If a collection is missed, how can we make it easier to report and understand what happens next? Simultaneously, how can we help councils to reduce avoidable contact about missed collections and the associated costs?

Here are some of the ways WasteWorks helps to keep missed collections to a minimum, accommodating the individual needs of each council and ensuring reports are only made when a collection has genuinely been missed.

Download collection schedules to a digital device calendar

WasteWorks gives users the ability to download a live collection schedule to a digital device calendar, such as a mobile phone or laptop.

Cleverly, the calendar events will update automatically whenever you need to make a change to a collection schedule, such as for bank holidays. 

Collection calendar PDFs

For councils that produce downloadable collection calendars, WasteWorks can now automatically match properties to the correct PDF calendar based on:

• Collection day
• Collection schedule
• Round configuration

This allows users to quickly access the correct calendar for their address without needing to search manually.

Time-restricted problem reporting

Harnessing data shared through integration with an in-cab system, WasteWorks is able to lock the form for reporting a collection as missed until your waste collection crews have definitely finished their route. 

It’s also possible to display preemptive messaging to users to explain that a collection may be delayed and why. 

Resolution-aware reporting

In cases where you know that a collection has been missed, a message can be displayed to users on the WasteWorks homepage to explain what happened. For example, if a bin was not presented, or access to the road was blocked. 

Such messaging can also be incorporated into the problem-reporting form, like we’ve done with the London Borough of Bromley’s WasteWorks, whose form workflow takes collection outcomes into account when residents report missed collections.

For example:

• If a collection was recorded as contaminated, residents receive guidance explaining why a missed collection cannot be reported.
• If a collection was marked as not presented, residents can dispute that outcome and request further review.

Closing the feedback loop

Perhaps most importantly, where a missed collection report is appropriate, users receive a confirmation of their report and updates as the report is handled by the council, reducing the need for costly follow-up contact. 

Updates are sent via email, but can also be sent via text where an integration with Notify is in place.

Meanwhile, for commercial waste clients, the process is the same. Users can check up on the status of their collections all from one dashboard, and self-serve reports and requests where necessary.

Where a collection was missed, information about why is provided directly from the integrated system, along with instructions for what to do next. 

If a container was not presented due to damage or theft, communication about these issues can also be handled through the WasteWorks dashboard, removing the need for expensive phone calls or emails (although customer service teams can use the same interface to complete reports or requests on behalf of residents or commercial waste clients who require support to use digital channels).

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If you’d like to understand more about how WasteWorks could work for you, drop us a message. 

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Image: Thomas on Pexels

By default, FixMyStreet reports are sent via email to the most appropriate available email address at the responsible authority. 

When our parent charity mySociety first launched the service back in 2007 this approach made perfect sense, but these days we understand that emails are not always convenient for councils using backend systems to manage their fault reports.

The good news is that reports don’t have to be sent via email; they can be sent directly into whichever system(s) you’re using via an Open311 API – and it can be done for free!

What is Open311?

In a nutshell, it’s a free, international technology, known as an open standard, that allows civic reporting services and systems to ‘talk to’ each other.

Setting up an Open311 API endpoint for FixMyStreet will enable you to receive reports from FixMyStreet.com and the app directly into your backend system(s) instead of via email. It will also allow you to close/update reports on FixMyStreet.com or the app when work is completed.

Open311 isn’t new (we’ve been using it to connect to council systems since 2011), but it still isn’t as widely known as it deserves to be.

Getting started with Open311

Setting up an Open311 endpoint yourself to provide access to one or more of your current services shouldn’t take you more than a few days of development: it usually only needs the support of your technical team and some project management time. We can also build and maintain the integration for you if desired for a small annual fee. 

You can find plenty more information here, and you can read our full Open311 technical specification on GitHub. For any other questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and we’ll be happy to help. 

About FixMyStreet

If you’re reading this you probably already know what FixMyStreet is, but just in case you don’t: FixMyStreet is a free service built by mySociety to make it easier for anyone to report a problem in their local area without needing to have any knowledge of council boundaries or responsibilities.

The categories of problems that can be reported via FixMyStreet are dictated by you, the council, and we’re always willing to work with you to ensure you are receiving all of the information you need.

FixMyStreet routinely includes the following information in its reports:

• User’s name, email address, and, if given, phone number
• Report category
• Report title and description
• Easting & northing, latitude & longitude
• Nearest road to the pin placed on the map (automatically generated by Bing Maps)
• Nearest postcode to the pin placed on the map (automatically generated)

Almost twenty years on from its launch, FixMyStreet acts as a national reporting platform, bringing all of the local authorities and government organisations together on one system, triaging reports between councils at all levels, highways agencies and housing associations. 

There’s also a Pro version of the software, available for councils and other authorities that want to introduce features designed to reduce unnecessary contact and duplicate reporting, provided by us (SocietyWorks).

If you’d like to learn more about FixMyStreet or FixMyStreet Pro, send us a message and we’ll get back to you.

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Image: Alexas Fotos on Pexels

The Canal & River Trust has chosen SocietyWorks’ FixMyStreet Pro solution as its new platform for the reporting of national waterway and towpath issues, complete with integration with its fault management system, SugarCRM, and Microsoft Entra ID for single sign-on.

The Canal & River Trust looks after 2,000 miles of canals and rivers across England and Wales. With such a vast network to maintain, reports from boaters and other members of the public about issues on, in and around canals, rivers and towpaths play a vital role in helping the charity to carry out its work. However, it’s not always easy for people to know when a problem is the Canal & River Trusts’ responsibility, and when it’s that of a local authority or other public body, with high potential for misreporting, delays and disengagement.

Understanding this, the Canal & River Trust wanted to provide an easy way for people to report problems accurately, and to have those reports along with any associated photos and other necessary details sent directly into its management system, so it chose to procure a dedicated version of FixMyStreet Pro.

From stuck lock mechanisms and damaged bridges to water contamination and overgrown vegetation, FixMyStreet Pro’s map-based technology will provide a simple and intuitive way for boaters and other users of waterways and towpaths to report problems and receive updates on the issue’s journey toward resolution.

As a networked service connected to the national FixMyStreet site, issues which are not the responsibility of the Canal & River Trust will be diverted based on the location and category selected within the report. Likewise, issues reported via FixMyStreet or one of our other council cobrand instances of FixMyStreet Pro which should go to the Canal & River Trust will be triaged, helping to improve the user experience and reduce avoidable and inaccurate contact for all parties.

Integrated with SugarCRM, updates will be sent automatically to and from FixMyStreet Pro. A second integration with Microsoft Entra ID will enable both staff and public users to use a single sign-on method when logging in.

A progressive web app, FixMyStreet Pro works on all devices and even allows for reports to be started while offline, which will be handy for reporting in areas where connectivity is unreliable.

Users will benefit from being able to see existing reports on the map, and will have potential duplicates suggested to them at the point of reporting, with the option to subscribe to the existing report. Asset layers provided by the Canal & River Trust will be applied to the map to help increase accuracy when reporting in certain categories, while reports in other categories will require extra information to be provided by the report-maker to help triage the report.

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said: “Extending the scope of FixMyStreet to incorporate reporting along waterways and towpaths is such an important and exciting development for members of the public and for authorities.

“We’re exceptionally pleased to be working with the Canal & River Trust on this project. Building on nearly twenty years of experience, the charity has recognised the reliable and transformative nature of FixMyStreet Pro, sharing in our belief that reporting problems to help care for our local communities should be as easy as possible.”

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Image: Miguel Saddi Vitorino on Pexels

As a provider of a front-end local authority waste portal, a regular requirement we receive from our WasteWorks clients is around updating pricing structures.

Creating the flexibility to accommodate the individual needs of different councils and their different charging models has been built into the structure of WasteWorks. 

In addition to handling standard annual pricing changes for services like green or bulky waste, take a look at some recent new examples of how WasteWorks has been supporting councils to navigate waste pricing changes in a way that keeps things simple for users.

Different pricing by customer type

For the London Borough of Bromley, the minimum charge for bulky waste collections now varies depending on whether the booking is for a domestic or commercial property.

Staff using the WasteWorks admin interface can access and adjust the pricing structure as needed. Alternatively, because WasteWorks is a hosted and managed service, we can also run a script to update pricing changes at set times (eg. at midnight at the start of a new month).

This ensures that front-end users are always shown the correct cost for their collection at the point of making a booking.

POPs collection charges

The London Borough of Sutton introduced separate pricing for bulky waste collections containing Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), such as upholstered furniture and sofas.

WasteWorks now supports differentiated charging based on whether POPs items are included in a booking, all of which can be managed by council staff from within the admin interface.

Premiums and discounts

Meanwhile, the London Borough of Bexley’s WasteWorks needs to accommodate pricing differences for weekend collections for bulky waste, including:

• Premium charges for Saturday collections
• Discounts for residents receiving state pensions or disability-related support
• A points-based pricing system where items are assigned values based on size and collection requirements

The platform accommodates these pricing rules while keeping the booking process straightforward for residents.

Container request charging

And finally, we have also implemented new charging models for container requests. Take the London Borough of Sutton’s WasteWorks as an example, which enables the council to display to residents:

• Premium food caddy options
• Charges based on container size changes
• Different pricing for upgrades and downgrades

These examples demonstrate the flexibility available when designing service-specific pricing structures.

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WasteWorks is designed to accommodate the individual business needs, operational processes and system configurations of different councils. Contact us to discuss how it could work for you.

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Image: Hassan Bouamoud on Pexels

The next stage of our phased rollout of WasteWorks for the London Borough of Bexley has been completed, incorporating the ability for residents to securely access services related to clinical waste. 

Facilitated through integration with the Whitespace Work Software in-cab system, Bexley’s WasteWorks provides an intuitive self-service workflow for residents with an existing registration to clinical waste collections to report a problem with their collection. Where a registration does not exist, WasteWorks links to the council’s clinical waste enquiry form. 

For sharps boxes, any resident can book a collection for their property. WasteWorks collects information from the user regarding the box(es) included in the collection and whether any replacements are required. Bookings made via WasteWorks are reflected in the in-cab system, and a reference number is provided for the user, along with a confirmation email.

WasteWorks sends email reminders to users, and notifies users if a collection is not able to be completed, including a reason for why. 

Clinical waste services can be accessed from the homepage of WasteWorks, from which users can see information about all other waste collections associated with their property. For the purpose of privacy, only Bexley staff members are able to see if a property has a clinical waste or sharps box collection scheduled for a property’s address. 

The addition of clinical waste to Bexley’s WasteWorks service means that residents can now use it to access the following services:

• Check bin days on-demand;
• Track the status of collections;
• Add waste collection days to a smartphone or computer online calendar (they update automatically when changes are made);
• Report missed collections;
• Request a new rubbish or recycling bin;
• Request a replacement bin;
• Request the removal of a bin (without needing to request a new one);
• Subscribe to the garden waste collection service;
• Book a bulky waste collection;
• Book a sharps box collection.

A spokesperson from the London Borough of Bexley said:

“The London Borough of Bexley is proud to announce the successful implementation of the Clinical Waste service into WasteWorks, delivered in partnership with Society Works.

“This milestone marks a significant enhancement in the borough’s digital waste management capabilities, providing residents with a streamlined and user-friendly way to book sharps collections and manage scheduled clinical waste collections online.

“The project, delivered in close collaboration between SocietyWorks, Bexley’s Digital Team, and Environmental Services, has seen strong uptake since launch. Residents now benefit from a modernised booking system, with the ability to view and report on scheduled clinical waste collections, improving transparency and accessibility.”

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said:

“Bexley is the first of our WasteWorks clients to introduce clinical waste into the service and it is great to see the functionality go live. Working with the team at Bexley has been a genuine pleasure, keeping pace with their needs and ensuring each new phase of the WasteWorks project is exactly what they need to provide an intuitive service for residents.”

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For more information about WasteWorks, please get in touch.