News

G-Cloud 15 is now live, and we’re pleased to have once again had our services accepted onto the framework, hosted by the Government Commercial Agency.

Using Lot 2b (Software as a Service), buyers can now procure the following services from SocietyWorks:

FixMyStreet Pro

Our longest-running service, FixMyStreet Pro is a community-centric and map-based digital reporting solution for street, highway and environment faults.

Building on nearly 20 years of experience, FixMyStreet Pro helps authorities to build trust, reduce costs and foster effective engagement with members of the public.

WasteWorks

Designed to simplify access to local authority waste services online and reduce unnecessary contact, WasteWorks is a user-centred front-end waste portal. 

A key change to the WasteWorks listing on G-Cloud 15 is the addition of Commercial Waste to the service for those that need it. 

EnviroWorks

A new addition to our offering on the framework, EnviroWorks is a 100% private and secure environmental health reporting service and case management system. 

An extension of our existing noise reporting service running since 2021, EnviroWorks integrates into your authority’s website to provide residents and businesses with an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly interface for making and updating reports directly to your internal teams – and nobody else.

ApplyWorks

ApplyWorks provides a highly usable front-end online workflow for processing citizens’ applications for licences, and a comprehensive application management system.

G-Cloud 15 introduces a brand new Lite plan for authorities looking to transform online application forms without the need for an accompanying case management system.

FOIWorks

Our award-winning, open source, front end Freedom of Information request service developed in collaboration with local authorities, for local authorities.

FOIWorks streamlines authorities’ FOI workflows by suggesting public records from previous case responses and reducing the amount of correspondence.

SocietyWorks Suite

For authorities looking to procure more than one of our solutions at the same time, our combined product option streamlines the procurement process. 

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If you would like to understand more about how any of our services could work for you, please get in touch.

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Image: Thu Huynh on Pexels

This post is the first in our Responsible Tech series, in which we explore open source technology and data privacy, security, and sovereignty. Written by our Managing Director, Angela Dixon, this post is aimed at executives who care deeply about delivering citizen and societal outcomes but also understand they have to balance the books.

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I’ve often warned my team to beware of people like me; the leaders or executives who hold the power of decision making in areas outside their expertise. We may be deeply versed in traditional approaches to strategy and have risen through the ranks due to our level heads, our commitment to real world results, and demonstration of returns on investment. What we know is useful and important, but it is what we don’t know that creates risk in the organisations we serve.

No one can be an expert in everything and that’s ok. But for decisions about complex problems that exist within even more complex systems with evolving and uncertain variables, if we (and others) don’t recognise our knowledge gaps and limitations, then we risk the outcomes we are working for. 

The technology choices made for public services are of critical importance. These decisions intrinsically contain the power for improving lives and the potential to cause significant harm. Any executive who makes decisions over which technology is to be deployed in the service of the public good has the responsibility to hold a good enough understanding of what effective and reliable technology looks like and be open to listening and asking the right questions of the experts. 

The benefits of open and reusable source code

UK Government Service Standard 12, the standard used to define what “good” looks like for digital public services, states ‘Make new source code open’. All new source code should be open and reusable and if this is not possible, a convincing explanation should be provided. Deviation from the use of open-by-default is the exception, not the rule. But why is this important? 

• Open source code can be reused by developers working in government, avoiding duplication of work and reducing costs
• Publishing source code under an open licence means that you’re less likely to get locked in to working with a single supplier.

The Technology Code of Practice has also shared guidance on the open source preference for software advising public services to be open and use open source to improve ‘transparency, flexibility, and accountability.’

Commercial software suppliers vs open source

Open source software shared and reused across Government creates the opportunity for large financial savings and maintains the balance of power with the commercial software market. Whether software is built and maintained in-house or outsourced to a supplier, if it is the product of public spend, then it should be built to be reused and shared.

Commercial software suppliers may try to prevent this as it will erode their profit margins. However, there is a negotiation to be had if public authorities worked together to address the balance of power. MHCLG has undertaken work to develop their understanding of the local government software market and address common concerns about poor interoperability between systems, lack of transparency in pricing, limited competition and choice, and difficulties with migration and implementation. There will hopefully follow heightened expectations for more suppliers that are paid by the public purse to be open by default. 

“If it is the product of public spend, then it should be built to be reused and shared”

There are already private-public sector partnerships that exist to maintain open source software for the public sector. These operating models balance the paying of sensible wages to the private suppliers (who accept they will not become rich out of public funds) with having a sustainable model for implementation, development and maintenance of public sector open source software. For example, LocalGovDrupal, an initiative originally funded by the Local Digital Fund, is now governed by a cooperative model to sustain and develop its open source web publishing platform for councils. SocietyWorks represents another sustainable model: a social enterprise that develops and runs citizen-centred, flexible, open source software for local government and other public bodies. Phil Rumens, Principal Technologist for GDS Local posted that “Open‑source products can deliver significant value for local government, but adoption is often held back by risk and uncertainty, not a lack of options.” 

Open source software is designed to be publicly accessible which means it can be seen, modified and reused. While originally intended for distributed communities to contribute and develop together, this does not mean that it is at risk of any member of the public changing live code. People outside of public authorities may voluntarily submit suggested improvements or bug fixes, and there should be processes baked in for review before accepting any new code or changes to the live sites.  

Reducing risk with open code

The NHS created an outcry when it reversed its long-standing open source policy citing cyber security and hacking fears, specifically the ability of advanced AI models like Mythos to spot vulnerabilities. The Government Digital Service and DSIT promptly responded by publishing guidance on AI, open code and vulnerability risk in the public sector. The guidance emphasises that “the primary driver of exploitation risk is the presence of weaknesses in systems – including unpatched vulnerabilities, insecure implementation, and unsafe configuration or deployment – and the inability to remediate them quickly” and that publishing open source code reduces those risks. Open code is a strength, not a vulnerability.

With the power and availability of AI-assisted software analysis moving at pace, doubling down on robust secure-by-design architecture and implementation, deployment, configuration, dependency hygiene and access control is the pragmatists approach to secure public service software. Embedding secure-by-design principles to software development and maintenance at the outset and throughout the service lifecycle is how the public sector will also continue to benefit from reuse and transparent delivery, as well as avoid the duplication of builds, costs and vendor lock-in. 

Open source software provides “the freedom to keep the repair path open after the original author is gone”. This is critical for infrastructure sustainability and succession planning. Access to legacy or proprietary closed code, that which the majority of technology vendors provide to the public sector at high cost, can be lost if an authority ends a contract. Open source software avoids vendor lock-in as a public authority may switch vendors to continue developing or maintaining the software and are equally free to bring this in house. This is the strategic move for the pragmatists undertaking sustainable infrastructure planning.

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Connect with Angela on LinkedIn to chat more about open source software.

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Image: Alice C via Pexels

Did you know that reports of problems with EV charging points can be accepted via FixMyStreet Pro? Councils, highways authorities and other public bodies using the solution can include EV charging points among the categories available for reports via individual instances of the service.

As a reporting service for street, highway and environment faults, FixMyStreet Pro is capable of accepting reports for a variety of different issues, acting as a single front door to fault reporting for any public realm issue.

With the rise in the use of electric vehicles, reports from members of the public about EV charging points on public roads have also increased, leading to several of our FixMyStreet Pro clients asking if such reports could be fielded through the service alongside reports of, for example, potholes, blocked drains and broken street lights.  

EV charging categories on FixMyStreet Pro

As with any functionally on FixMyStreet Pro, the way EV charging point reports are incorporated into the service can be done in a number of different ways depending on the needs of the individual authority.

For example, Northumberland County Council accepts reports related to EV charging and organises them by the following subcategories: Damaged; Malfunction; On-street charging application; Payment issue; and Other.  

Reports made within these categories are triaged to the appropriate area within the council’s integrated backend system where they are picked up by the relevant team.

Meanwhile, Surrey County Council collects all EV charging related reports through one main category, and then makes use of FixMyStreet Pro’s extra questions functionality to triage the report. 

Upon selecting a category, extra information, including images, can be displayed to support accurate reporting and manage expectations around how reports will be responded to. 

For example, Shropshire Council uses this feature to explain which EV charging points can and can’t be reported via its FixMyStreet Pro, helping to differentiate between public and private charging points. 

Displaying EV charging assets on the FixMyStreet Pro map

Where asset data is available, FixMyStreet Pro can display individual EV charging points on the map via an asset layer shared from an integrated asset management system. 

Surrey County Council’s FixMyStreet Pro service enables users to select the exact EV charging point about which they want to make a report. This helps to improve the accuracy of reports, reducing the administrative burden for staff and the carbon impact of having frontline crews drive around trying to find the correct charging point.

Making use of asset layers also helps to divert reports about charging points that are not the responsibility of the council or authority using FixMyStreet Pro.

Diverting EV charging reports via FixMyStreet Pro

For authorities that don’t handle reports relating to EV charging, or are not yet ready for a digital process for these reports, but still want to help signpost people to the help they need, it’s possible to divert reports using FixMyStreet Pro.

Here again, this can be done in several ways. Reports in the EV charging category can be diverted automatically to another body where appropriate (just like how we divert reports of abandoned hire bikes and e-scooters in London to the responsible operator).

Alternatively, messages can be displayed to users to provide information on and signpost to alternative reporting methods. For example, upon trying to report a public EV charging point to Gloucestershire County Council using its FixMyStreet Pro, users are signposted to a phone number the council would like to be used for such reports.

Taking applications for EV charging points via FixMyStreet Pro

In addition to taking reports of problems with EV charging points via FixMyStreet Pro, councils and other authorities can also make use of the technology to collect applications for EV charging points to be installed. 

Northumberland’s ‘On-site EV charging application’ category enables users to select an address from the map and apply for the installation of an EV charging point.

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For more information about taking reports relating to EV charging via FixMyStreet Pro, or about any of the solution’s other features, please get in touch. 

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Image: Reinhard Bruckner via Pexels

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

This post was written in August 2026 prior to the government’s decision to pause LGR, but the points made remain relevant for councils navigating upcoming changes to both their internal and external environment. 

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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