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Latest news and innovations for councils and the public sector from the SocietyWorks team.

Merton Council switches to WasteWorks to manage online access to residential waste

Merton Council is the latest in a growing number of local authorities to use WasteWorks for providing self-service online access to residential waste services.

SocietyWorks has launched a brand new installation of WasteWorks for Merton Council, including integration into three of the Council’s systems to enable a seamless flow of data and ensure residents can access up-to-date information on-demand.

Branded to complement Merton Council’s existing online environment, WasteWorks enables residents to self-serve information about the waste services associated with their property, including checking their bin days, monitoring the status of their collections and reporting problems such as missed collections or damage once the collection round is completed.

Image shows a desktop and mobile version of Merton's WasteWorks service
Built as a progressive web app, WasteWorks is optimised to work on any device and can be saved to mobile device homescreens to be used as an app without obligation to download or update an application

Users can also request new or extra containers, request assisted collections and book, subscribe to and pay for green and bulky waste collections using the service.

Data on collections is surfaced for users via integration with the Selected Interventions Echo in-cab system, used by the Council’s waste services provider Veolia. The service is also integrated into the Council’s own CRM system, powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365, to enable council staff to manage all reports and requests from a central system. Meanwhile, payments for one-off or subscription services are handled through integration with Adelante SmartPay.

Image shows a section of the WasteWorks service for Mixed recycling and the information is surfaces from the in-cab system
WasteWorks displays past and upcoming collections, including information on if and when collections were completed

WasteWorks was launched in 2021 and designed in collaboration with Bromley Council, where it produced a 40% drop in unnecessary contact within the first few months of launching and a continual rise in subscriptions to waste services. Shortlisted for the Public/Private Partnership award at the LGC Awards 2022, the solution aims to reduce avoidable contact and simplify access to waste services.

SocietyWorks is already partnered with Merton Council for the provision of its street, highway and environment reporting service, which has been powered by FixMyStreet Pro since 2021. 

Maureen McKean, Customer Access Point Team Leader at Merton Council, said: “The transition to WasteWorks was pretty much seamless and the level of support during the go live period superb. Any issues were rapidly dealt with. Users have been able to adapt to the new process well.”

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said: “The implementation of WasteWorks marks a new chapter in our partnership with Merton, and as a small, not-for-profit supplier we are delighted to have Merton’s trust in supporting them with another service area transition. We look forward to seeing the impact WasteWorks has in the borough.”

Find out more about WasteWorks.


SocietyWorks provides London Borough of Bexley with new residential waste portal

We’re delighted to be providing the London Borough of Bexley with a dedicated installation of WasteWorks, our integrated front-end residential waste portal.

We are working in partnership with Bexley using agile methodologies to provide a phased roll out of WasteWorks.

The first phase of this project delivers the initial functionality of the service, including an API integration into the Council’s in-cab system, which is provided by Whitespace Work Software. This enables residents to check their bin days on-demand, and report missed collections within specified timeframes (e.g. only after the waste crew has completed its round).

WasteWorks is designed as a progressive web app, providing the same user experience on any device and can be saved as an app without needing to use a separate codebase

Following this, future phases of the project will introduce functionality including bulky and green garden waste subscriptions, new container and assisted collection requests, clinical waste collections and more. 

WasteWorks is the second SocietyWorks solution chosen by Bexley, where FixMyStreet Pro has been providing an easy way for residents to report local street, highway and environment problems since 2019. The two services will sit alongside each other, sharing the same accessible and user-friendly design.

Rob Flicker, Project Lead and Digital Manager at London Borough of Bexley, said: Bexley were looking for a new Waste solution to improve our resident journey, providing an easy-to-use reporting tool and full integration with our Waste Management system. We evaluated several different options and selected WasteWorks as the best fit for Bexley.

The first phase of the project delivered by SocietyWorks was to provide residents with a Bin Collection Day look up together with the ability to report Missed Bins as part of the new functionality. The SocietyWorks team have delivered an excellent product that provides Bexley’s residents with an easy-to-use reporting tool and displays clear real-time status updates for this service.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank the SocietyWorks Team for getting the WasteWorks solution live on-time and on-budget. I am looking forward to working with them to implement the Garden Waste and Replacement Containers services for the next phase of this project implementation.”

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said: “Providing simple, self-service digital access to residential waste services is essential for local authorities looking to improve service delivery while keeping costs down. We’re so pleased to be working with the team at Bexley on this project, and look forward to seeing the impact WasteWorks makes.”

Mike Nicholls, Chief Commercial Officer at Whitespace Work Software, said: “Whitespace Work Software plays a crucial role in our mission to modernise waste management services for the London Borough of Bexley. Through API integration into the WasteWorks portal, residents will benefit from seamless access to vital information regarding bin days and reporting missed collections.”

About WasteWorks

WasteWorks launched in 2021 and was co-designed with the London Borough of Bromley, where its intelligent features have helped the Council to achieve a 40% drop in avoidable customer contacts about waste services.

Shortlisted for the Public/Private Partnership Award at the LGC Awards 2022, WasteWorks is designed as a Progressive Web App (PWA). This means it functions beautifully on any device, and can be downloaded to mobile devices to be used as an app, without the need to maintain a separate app codebase.

Find out more about WasteWorks here.


Team post: Two days at Open Data Camp

At SocietyWorks we believe in transparency. One of the ways we live this value is by working in the open, and giving our team members space on our blog to write about what they’re working on, something they’re interested in or even perhaps a mistake or challenge they’ve learned from.

In this blog post our Head of Development, Matthew Somerville, writes about his experience attending the Open Data Camp 9 unconference in Manchester on 6 and 7 July 2024.

Last weekend, I went to the Open Data Camp 9 unconference in Manchester. I hadn’t been to an Open Data Camp before; it was very well organised, with good food, lots of volunteers, a creche, people from Drawnalism making lovely pictorial summaries of many of the sessions (see the website link above, and I’ll embed some from the sessions I went to below so you can see how amazing they are), they organised accommodation (if you needed it), and more.

For those who might not know what is meant by “open data”, there was a session about that – there’s a really good summary in the session notes at Open Data 101: Open Day for Newbies (2024 edition). The definition given there is: “Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone, subject at most only to the requirement to attribute and share alike.”

Here at mySociety and SocietyWorks, we use, reuse, and publish a lot of open data. For example, MapIt is based on open data, as is FixMyStreet and FixMyStreet Pro. TheyWorkForYou is repurposing open data into a slightly better format and WhatDoTheyKnow also includes a lot of open data.

A photo of a green lego map of the UK with multicoloured lego bricks placed in various locations to show where people had come from to the event
A lego board at the event showed where attendees had come from

The venue was the Engineering building of the University of Manchester, which was round the corner from where I went to school (more on that later), and perfectly designed for an unconference, with four separate rooms all coming off a central hub room for food/ drinks/ chats. They had a Lego board to show where people had come from, and a pile of old out-of-copyright Manchester maps.

At this unconference, the pitches were ideas that people wanted to talk about and discuss as a group with interested others – I was happy just to see what came up and hopefully have some interesting conversations.

Day one

A drawing summary of the pitches on day 1 at Open Data Camp by Drawnalism
A drawing summary of the pitches on day 1 at Open Data Camp by Drawnalism

In the morning, I first went to a talk about deleting data and having too much data, which was a broad look at the costs of maintenance and APIs vs datasets. I raised the idea of it being much easier to maintain/look after if the open data is embedded within the processes of that data (e.g. your street light asset management system leading directly to the publication of that street light data, not requiring a special export to a special open data platform that could be subject to the vagaries of the current postholders). Following this I attended a discussion about the digital/data priorities of the first 100 days of the new Labour government.

A drawing summary of a session on open data and the new Labour government by Drawnalism

In the afternoon, I went to a session about data on elected officials / elections by Open Data Manchester, who had made e.g. a poster of deprivation vs representation, and were looking at doing more with councillor information and data. I contributed some info on how TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem works, our combined IMD dataset, and the popolo standard for representative data.

Then it was over to Owen Boswarva’s session on the campaign/case for open addresses. This has always been a topic dear and core to us; WriteToThem and TheyWorkForYou cannot provide accurate answers for every single postcode due to the lack of open address data. I/we were well-known by everyone there, and it was a look at the current situation and what could be done to push this forward. The new government is of course one possibility, and the new Business & Trade Minister (in charge of Royal Mail, if not Ordnance Survey) has met with people on this exact topic.

A drawing summary of a session on open addresses by Drawnalism

The last session I went to on the first day was about web scraping, open data, and ethics. Lot of self-awareness at this, looking at my and our history with TheyWorkForYou, Mapumental, traintimes, Theatricalia, someone else’s project on scraping Warm Spaces locations, and what differences are there in terms of ethicalness and behaviour.

Day two

A drawing summary of the pitches on day 2 of Open Data Camp by Drawnalism

Day two, after catching the same bus I used to catch as a kid to school (ever so slightly more expensive now), I went to a session by two people from Raileasy, wanting to talk about open data success stories in public transport. Lots of good chat about train data, bus data and the pros and cons of decentralisation.

Being that it’s a phrase we use often here at SocietyWorks when talking about what we help local authorities with, I couldn’t not go to a session called “Closing the feedback loop” by someone from Open Data Scotland discussing how do/can producers of open data be made aware of how their data is used; e.g. in the government case, generally so they know they shouldn’t just turn it off (though turning it off does bring people out of the woodwork, certainly!). Other possibilities discussed included asking for an email as ‘payment’ for getting the data, and in order to get notified of updates or deletions; or having a place to show/link to examples of how that specific data is used.

After lunch, the organisers ran a “go outside and explore” session to try and notice things you might not normally notice, with an animal avatar. I wanted to go back and see my old school, so I co-opted the octopus group to do this, and we had a nice walk around the area (which again, is quite changed from the 1990s and the Crescents), finding a wildflower meadow while we discussed open data.

Lastly, I went to data horror and data joy stories, where you can probably imagine some of the things talked about – one thing I mentioned was the opening up of Bank Holiday data in an official GOV.UK JSON file, which meant I could submit a Pull Request on GitHub when there was a mistake, and from there find out that Scotland had forgotten to create a Bank Holiday in 2010 and 2011

Other sessions I didn’t go to, but would have liked to…

And probably more – do take a quick look through their blog.

That’s it! Thanks for having me, Open Data Camp!


SocietyWorks welcomes two new board members

We are delighted to have appointed two new members to our board of directors: Anna Scott and Alastair Tibbitt.

Both Anna and Alastair join us as non-executive directors, each bringing a wealth of experience and insight that will help us to ensure we are providing the highest level of support to our public sector clients. 

Anna and Alastair have also taken seats as trustees on the board of our parent charity mySociety.

Meet Anna

Anna Scott

Anna is a content, brand and User Centred Design specialist with a background in data and human rights. She directed content and brand strategy at Open Data Institute, 360Giving and clients across data ethics and civic tech, and cut her teeth as a Guardian journalist.

Anna currently designs digital public services as a Senior Content Designer at Defra. She has a Masters in Human Rights from UCL. Outside work, Anna spends time chasing her toddler around and working on an electronic music project.

Meet Alastair

Alastair is a journalist and digital audience specialist with decades of experience in digital media and developing new models for public interest news.

Alastair currently works at The Conversation, and has previously worked with broadcaster STV, along with a number of other non-profit news projects. He is a founding co-director of Scottish investigative journalism co-operative, The Ferret. He also provides training and mentoring to journalists and campaigners on how to make the most of their information rights.

As a not-for-profit organisation wholly owned by a charity, our board members give their time and expertise voluntarily. We’re grateful to each of them for their guidance. Get to know the rest of our board or get in touch to ask us a question


Customisable waste container images for WasteWorks

At SocietyWorks we believe in transparency. One of the ways we live this value is by working in the open, and giving our team members space on our blog to write about what they’re working on, something they’re interested in or even perhaps a mistake or challenge they’ve learned from.

In this blog post our Head of Development, Matthew Somerville, writes about a new waste container generator for our WasteWorks solution which uses CSS to make it easier to generate waste images tailored to individual councils’ branding and bin types.

WasteWorks is in use by a number of different councils, all of which have their own types of bin, in various colours and sizes (you can see a large array of photos of bins in use by local councils at the lovely govbins.uk site). An image of each type of bin associated with a property is displayed to residents from the WasteWorks homepage.

Screenshot of the homepage of WasteWorks, which shows different types of collections and the associated waste container
Example of WasteWorks’ homepage showing different types of collections and the associated waste container

Our designer Lucas came up with some nice simple iconography for us to use on bin day pages, including domestic wheelie bins, communal bins, sacks and boxes. When we’ve had a new client, whose bins are differently coloured to any previous council, Lucas has been providing us with new PNG images to match the bins the council uses, exported from the source vector images. As well as the right colours, each PNG had to be provided at two different sizes, to work with high-resolution displays, and so we’ve built up a small collection of such bin images over the years.

These pictures only vary by colour (and the presence of a recycling logo), so I wondered if there was a better way we could generate these images. SVGs are vector graphics – they scale to any resolution, and importantly for this can be styled with CSS, the same mechanism used to style a web page. CSS also has “variables”, where you can define e.g. a variable to be a particular colour, and then use that variable in a different part of the document (or SVG image).

On the right hand side a blue waste box, on the right a communal container. Both have an option to change the colour using a colour picker.
Users can customise the colour of waste container images to be used on the WasteWorks homepage using the generator

Lucas and I worked together to come up with SVGs for the various containers, which instead of specifying any fill colours directly, used one or more CSS variables to specify the colours. For the recycling logo, we set a variable for the opacity of the logo – defaulting to 0, so invisible, but we can set it to 1 to have it appear.

We’ve added a page to our user manual where you can play around with the colour of our new bin images in real time:
https://www.societyworks.org/manuals/wasteworks/container-picture-generator/ :-)

More technical details

The header of our domestic wheelie bin SVG looks something like this:

<svg class="waste-service-image">
 <style>
  .wheel { fill: #333333; }
  .main { fill: var(--primary-color, var(--default-color)); }
  .lid { fill: var(--lid-color, var(--primary-color, var(--default-color))); }
  .recycling-logo { fill: #ffffff; opacity: var(--recycling-logo, 0); }
 </style>
 ...

See that the CSS uses the var() fallback parameter so that the lid colour will e.g. default to the primary colour if not specified.

We used CSS mix-blend-modes in order to have shadows and highlights that would work regardless of the colour they were placed on top of; here’s an example shadow:

<g style="mix-blend-mode:multiply" opacity="0.12">
  <path fill="black" d="M95.1227 90.7581L120.495 681.301H79.3654L50.9626 90.7581H95.1227Z">
</g>

Then when we embed an SVG in someone’s bin day page, the web page itself, outside the image, can specify what colour to use by setting the corresponding CSS variable, and the picture will then appear in the right colours. When we have a new bin colour, we don’t need to create a new image, only set the right colour.

Here’s the outline of an SVG on a bin day page, for a grey bin with a blue lid, showing the recycling logo:

<span style="--primary-color: #767472; --lid-color: #00A6D2; --recycling-logo: 1;">
 <svg class="waste-service-image">
  <style>
   [... style as above ...]
  </style>
  [...]
 </svg>
</span>

SocietyWorks is now on CCS’ Low Value Purchase System

We are pleased to announce that SocietyWorks has been accepted onto the Crown Commercial Service’s (CSS) Low Value Purchase System (LVPS).

The LVPS is specifically for low cost and uncomplicated goods and services. Our SaaS products can be purchased through the LVPS either through direct award or via what’s known as a mini competition. 

As a not-for-profit SME, being accepted onto the LVPS opens up a vital new route to market, while giving our customers another Public Contracts Regulations 2015 compliant and pre-approved way to procure our solutions.

Our acceptance onto the framework is also testament to our belief that pricing should always be transparent and costs should always be kept to a minimum, even when the impact is high. Visit the CCS website for more information on how the LVPS works.

Our products and services are also available on G-Cloud and Digital Outcomes.

If you have any questions about procuring SocietyWorks’ solutions, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help. 


SocietyWorks is now Cyber Essentials Plus certified

We are delighted to share that SocietyWorks has been awarded a Cyber Essentials Plus certification, along with our parent charity mySociety.

 

 

The Cyber Essentials Plus audited certification follows our existing Cyber Essentials certification, which we have been awarded yearly since 2019.

As a supplier of digital products and services to local authorities and the public sector, we know that cyber security is of the utmost importance to our customers.

Achieving the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation reflects our continued commitment to cyber security, with robust policies and technical controls in place to defend against the most common cyber threats. 

You can find more information about Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus on the National Cyber Security Centre website.

Or you might like to read more about our approach to security and secure hosting for our digital solutions.

Image: Image by Freepik


Residential waste services require flexibility – and we’re committed to providing it

As an organisation we talk a lot about how our civic tech products are able to flex around individual authorities’ needs. This is not something we say because it sounds good; it is a commitment from us.

Take our residential waste management portal WasteWorks as an example. 

A waste service that works for everyone

WasteWorks is a front-end SaaS product which integrates with in-cab systems to simplify online access to all waste services associated with a property’s address, such as checking your bin days, ordering a new container or reporting a problem with a collection.

We built the core WasteWorks service in 2021 in collaboration with the London Borough of Bromley, who wanted to reduce the amount of unnecessary contact they were receiving about residential waste services caused by their existing processes. 

With that goal in mind, we equipped WasteWorks with the ability to not only let residents self-serve up-to-date information about their waste collections (including being able to download a live schedule to their device’s calendar), but also to ensure that reports of, for example, missed collections can only be made after the crew has completed their rounds.

Since launching for Bromley, WasteWorks has consistently achieved a 40% drop in unnecessary contact, and made the final of the LGC Awards 2022 in the Public/Private Partnership category. 

As more authorities have adopted the service, we have continued to add new functionality in alignment with the needs of our community of users, including:

  • Green garden waste subscriptions – enabling residents to subscribe to and pay for green waste collections
  • Bulky waste collection bookings – residents can book and pay for a one-off collection or subscribe to repeat collections if required
  • Small item collections – take bookings for the collection of small items, such as batteries and textiles
  • Assisted collection requests – let residents request help from your waste crew with their bin collection(s)
  • New container payments – take payments for new containers when requested by residents

The implementation of these features differs per council, adapting to their different rules, workflows and seasonal circumstances. 

Image shows a desktop and mobile version of the bulky waste collection service of WasteWorks for Kingston and Sutton

For example, where an authority needs to understand what and how many containers a property already has we are able to add in extra questions to gather this information.

In other instances, where an authority experiences shortages of sacks, we are able to give council staff the ability to temporarily switch off orders and communicate transparently. 

The future

Each council using WasteWorks has made it their own, with slightly different configurations to make it exactly what they need.

We can facilitate this because our software is built with local authority differences in mind. We have learned from delivering our long-running street and environment reporting service FixMyStreet Pro across over 30 authorities that even when the goal is the same, the approach can differ. We embed that flexibility into all of our products.

In terms of new developments, we will continue to be led by our users (both residents and staff) following our citizen-centred design principles. User groups enable us to bring everyone together to discuss ideas, while customers have the opportunity to log suggestions through our helpdesk service at any time. 

Waste is a service area that will be subject to much change over the coming years in response to new regulations and legislation aimed at helping us respond to climate change.  

However requirements change, we will be there to support our local authority clients along the journey.

If you’d like a conversation about transforming online access to residential waste services with scalable open source software, get in touch.

Image: Abel Matthew via Pexels


Musings on a Local Government Digital Service

At SocietyWorks we believe in transparency. One of the ways we live this value is by working in the open, and giving our team members space on our blog to write about what they’re working on, something they’re interested in or even perhaps a mistake or challenge they’ve learned from. 

This blog post has been written by Bekki Leaver, our Head of Product, who shares her thoughts on the potential creation of a Local Government Digital Service. 

There’s been some chatter around what a ‘Local Government Digital Service’ might look like, what it could offer, how it might contribute to digital services for local authorities and how it could be staffed. As a Government Digital Service (GDS) alumna and current digital service provider for local government, I have opinions on where there could be value here and what is likely to ruffle some feathers.

GDS have had considerable success at delivering tools to support central government (and local government, come to think of it) in building better services. They’ve centralised resource heavy processes others can simply tap into, such as GOV.UK Pay, Notify and the future One Login, to make complicated features easy to add. 

The design system and service communities have gone a long way to helping create accessible, consistent services. But now every department has its own iteration of the design system, because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all compendium of components and patterns, which highlights very well the problem with an alliance of local authorities working on digital services.

Even when authorities share a common goal and have the same internal systems, their approach and configurations can be wildly different

As an example, take FixMyStreet Pro and its integrated street reporting, our flagship product at SocietyWorks. While it could be said we “built it once” and can then ship that product out to whoever might want it, what actually happens is we do considerable customisation and configuration to our product so it can fit within the processes and ways of working within an authority. 

The experiences I’ve had at SocietyWorks clearly exemplify that even when authorities share a common goal and have the same internal systems, their approach and configurations can be wildly different, influenced by service level agreements, other systems or applications, or staff delivering a service.

The institution and its services need to reflect the people whom it serves. What works in a metropolitan city environment won’t work in a rural one

I think it would also be fair to say there’s a sense of personality and identity embedded in local authorities, a sense of pride for the place you live, and even a bit of competition with the neighbours. It’s not the faceless behemoth central government can be perceived as; it needs to be local and relevant to residents. The thought of imposing generic service provision onto these entities feels almost cruel. The institution and its services need to reflect the people whom it serves. What works in a metropolitan city environment won’t work in a rural one.

We all want to achieve the same goals, and regularly come across the same problems, but to solve them in the best way isn’t going to be some great overseer. It’s going to be collaboration on the ground at the most appropriate time. I see this in the partnerships throughout the UK of authorities banding together to solve their problems in smaller, more local ways, and in SocietyWorks’ own User Groups, bringing together those who use our services to learn from each other within a specific remit.

Overall, I’m really impressed with the things I see from these smaller partnerships and alliances, and I’m not convinced a LGDS is needed. Smaller partnerships definitely feel more approachable than a centralised organisation when, as part of an SME, I want to get involved. 

We need to properly establish the problem(s) and context we’re working in. We have regional specific groups, problem specific groups, and publications, communities, and awards to highlight the great work coming out of them. Do we need more channels to come together? I’m not convinced, but I’d absolutely volunteer to get involved in establishing the why, what and how!

If you’d like to chat to Bekki about anything in her blog post, you can connect with her on LinkedIn.

Image: charlesdeluvio


New FixMyStreet Pro services for North Northamptonshire Council and West Northamptonshire Council

Two new installations of FixMyStreet Pro have been launched for North Northamptonshire Council and West Northamptonshire Council, respectively. 

Residents can use both services to report local street, highway and environment problems, such as potholes, fly-tipping and blocked drains, to the two councils. 

Report-makers are kept informed on the status of their reports thanks to an Open311 API integration with the councils’ backend systems, which are managed by their highways contractor Kier.

Existing reports are shown on the map, and potential duplicates are suggested to users within the reporting workflow. If the problem is the same, they can subscribe to the existing report instead of re-reporting. 

Getting reports to the right place

FixMyStreet Pro is a map-based system, which triages reports based on the location data and category selected within a report. 

Helpfully, because FixMyStreet Pro is built upon the national FixMyStreet platform, the two versions of the service are able to triage reports between North and West Northamptonshire automatically, as well as nationally to other councils and to National Highways. 

[FixMyStreet Pro] will allow us to manage our customer expectations in a much more streamlined approach and enables us to move into a new way of working.  We would like to thank SocietyWorks for their help and support in achieving this.

Michelle Johnson, Senior Business Improvement Officer at West Northamptonshire Council

For reports of issues not handled by Kier, FixMyStreet Pro will direct these to internal teams within each council, who can manage responses and updates from the FixMyStreet Pro administration dashboard. 

Meanwhile, reports of abandoned vehicles will be sent to Northamptonshire Police.

This functionality helps to prevent unnecessary contact and failure demand, while improving the reporting experience for members of the public.

Easy to use for everyone

FixMyStreet Pro is designed as a Progressive Web App (PWA), which means each council benefits from a web service that functions beautifully on any device, and can be downloaded to mobile devices to be used as an app without needing to maintain two codebases.

Being a PWA also means the service provides offline functionality, enabling people to start reports while offline, save them as drafts and complete them when connected to the internet again. 

This is ideal for North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire, where a large proportion of the areas covered by the councils are very rural. 

This will also benefit on-the-ground inspector staff, who will be able to use FixMyStreet Pro’s administration features while out and about, such as viewing a shortlist of reports, inspecting problems and updating reports.

Mobile and desktop versions of North and West Northamptonshire Councils' FixMyStreet Pro service

Supporting Northamptonshire’s unitary transition

FixMyStreet Pro was first introduced in the county of Northamptonshire by the former Northamptonshire County Council and Kier in 2019.

In 2021, a unitary split turned Northamptonshire County Council into North Northamptonshire Council and West Northamptonshire Council. 

The new councils each absorbed responsibility for Northamptonshire’s district councils, with different issues now going to a different council based on location and category. 

Working with NNC and WNC and SocietyWorks has been a pleasure throughout, and we hope to continue to expand upon the functionality provided.

Dhugal Leverett, Senior Software Developer at Kier Transportation

FixMyStreet Pro continued to provide a combined reporting service for the two new councils to ensure there was no interruption for residents wanting to report a problem and minimise confusion around which council was now responsible for what.

That was a great interim solution to help each council navigate their internal changes while keeping things simple for residents on the front end until each was in a position to be able to roll out their own branded service.

Fixing streets in Northamptonshire

The launch of FixMyStreet Pro for North Northamptonshire Council and West Northamptonshire Council has been a collaborative effort between SocietyWorks, the two councils and Kier.

Philip Beecroft, Head of Highways at North Northamptonshire Council, said: “We are delighted to have secured our own independent FixMyStreet system by working with SocietyWorks. 

“The separation of the former County-wide system to provide North and West Northamptonshire each with a standalone service allows us to move forward with our customer journey in a much more efficient way and will allow our Highways Service Provider, Kier, to expand on the existing integration between their Works Management system and FixMyStreet. This will allow us to make any necessary changes to ensure that our customers receive the best service.”

Speaking on behalf of West Northamptonshire Council, Michelle Johnson, Senior Business Improvement Officer, said: “We are delighted to have split the system between us and North Northamptonshire Council. 

“The split will allow us to manage our customer expectations in a much more streamlined approach and enables us to move into a new way of working.  We would like to thank SocietyWorks for their help and support in achieving this.”

Dhugal Leverett, Senior Software Developer at Kier Transportation, added: “Kier are pleased to be able to expand on the existing integration between our Works Management system and FixMyStreet.

“Working with NNC and WNC and SocietyWorks has been a pleasure throughout, and we hope to continue to expand upon the functionality provided.”

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said: “I’m really proud of how we’ve been able to support North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire throughout this project.

“It’s wonderful to see our technology being used to its full potential by local authorities, to see how it supports authorities through times of change and uncertainty while transitioning to unitary, and always while keeping residents at the front and centre.”

Want to learn more about FixMyStreet Pro? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to answer your questions.


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