Canterbury City Council

Councils have a duty to keep their areas clean, safe and free from behaviour that impacts negatively on the environment, residents, businesses and visitors.

Public authorities are often guilty of pushing our complex policies on to users and as different authorities have different responsibilities, there is a confusion about who deals with what and to whom issues should be reported.

Boundaries are not problems that the user should have to think about – we should make it as easy as possible for these issues to be reported.

In our specific case, being a district council, we often get reports that should be aimed at the county, a neighbouring council or the police.

Incorrect reports lead to an avoidable increase in officer time, a frustrating experience for the user, who may be told to report it elsewhere, or may never even hear back at all.

Duplicate reports also lead to avoidable contact and reporting via a single interface would make it easier to display recently reported items in an effort to save user and officer time.

Authorities have different workflow systems and processes so we would need to ensure that the solution is open and capable of interacting with back office systems.