I registered and was able to access individual addresses and see previews of, admittedly, not very clear constituency maps.

Hope this helps, keep up the good work.

But my other points still stand. By the way, I accept that many of the same criticisms apply to the Direct.gov.uk website. Recently, this was heavily advertised with a half-page ad featuring a photo of a fire-damaged house in Tottenham. Even if someone knew the address of this property and had followed the Direct.gov links, they wouldn’t be any wiser about what’s actually going to happen to this site!

Meanwhile, there seem to be some glitches with the Fixit site. I’ve been trying to check what actually happens to reports which go to Haringey. This was the response from our Customer Services:

“We have only ever received four enquiries via this method, three in February 2007 and one in March.

In all four cases, sufficient information was provided… we have not needed further information. The attachments sent are supposedly ‘maps’, but we cannot access these attachments, so this doesn’t actually offer any additional facility.”

I can understand your view that members of the public would like to report something and forget about it. That’s how I feel about lots of services which I pay for. Unfortunately, neither the private sector nor the public sector work like that. Nor does Neighbourhood Fixit bring that goal any nearer.

On a very basic level, consider the problem in not being able get back to the person who reported a problem. It’s a serious drawback if they haven’t specified which potholes they mean. Or the model and regsitration number of the abandoned car which is perfectly obvious to them.

Is the ‘abandoned car’ really abandoned or untaxed? If the latter then the DVLA needs to be involved – so blaming the local council does not help. How we can local Council explain that to A. Nonymous?

Is a noise nuisance a one-off party or a regular event? To take somebody to Court and confiscate their equipment, staff may need to access someone’s home and measure the noise. They can’t do that if somebody made an anonymous report via a website.

Underlying the whole idea is the quaint notion that local councils should be a sort of ‘environmental fairy’. That their job is to go round quietly and remove dumping, litter, graffiti etc. For quite a lot of people all this does is ‘educate’ them to dump more. A resident once congratulated me on the way they could leave stuff on the pavement, report it to the Council and see it moved within 24 hours.

Just reporting and forgetting it ignores the reality that, for example, clean cities with recycled waste require a joint effort between citizens and local government and agencies. It certainly requires a behavioural change for the many thousands of Londoners who assume that they should leave rubbish and then complain if somebody else doesn’t clear it up.

That essential behaviour change will require a medium and long-term programme of persuasion and education. No quick fix there.

The Neighbourhood Fixit scheme also ignores current reality of how organisations work or fail to work when it comes to seeing and acting on patterns, and ‘framing’ problems.

For instance let’s take the argument put by Dominic –
‘that more senior managers get asked to explain the reasons for the growing volume! Even if the defects don’t get fixed any faster or at all.’

Really? Most of the time the Government’s dysfunctional attempts to micromanage local services by ‘targets’ means most local authority and contacted staff are forced to focus on their response times. They ‘score’ highly if they can ‘open’ and ‘close’ an inquiry within a set time-frame. There is no incentive to stop and reflect and try to respond in a different more intelligent way.

Imagination, lateral thinking and organisational learning don’t show up on the Performance Indicators. Nor does it help ‘Star’ ratings and other gradings if somebody takes the trouble to collect data, reflect on and reframe a problem.

But let’s assume this does happen. That staff use their brains and commitment to offer more than Call Centre scripts. They try learning from the thousands of requests made and experiment with new ways to tackle old problems. It does happen!

But consider what happens if experiments are ‘real’ and carry a risk of failure. The Government wants success. ‘Quick wins’ if possible. Fresh thought and experiments which may not succeed are not the stuff of congratulatory press releases.

A final point. Councils and their contractors can only spend public money once. It would be great if we could immediately resurface every road, re-light every street, remove every graffito, every dumped car and pile of rubbish. With a lot more money we might even be able to do this as fast as the requests come in. But budgeting really does means choosing.

It would be great if local people were involved in those choices. But choosing also means saying: ‘No’; or ‘Not yet’, to residents’ perfectly reasonable requests. Maybe your street a couple of years before my street.

Or what if the majority of local people actually prefer a lower Council Tax to paying for all these ‘public goods’? If resources aren’t available to tackle the problems, adding more websites to report problems adds nothing.

In fact they make it worse by multiplying the pile of problem reports which cannot be acted on.

Re: CommunityAlert:
I am the coordinator for this system.
Again this system provides a One-Stop shop for people to report anti social behaviour to their local Safer Neighbourhood Team – it is NOT a crime reporting system, and it is NOT intended to integrate with police systems, but more to help improve communications and relations between the public and the police LOCALLY.
The system is currently set up for the Bloomsbury Ward in London and is about to be launched in Holborn and Covent Garden – it is still a beta system. The Bloomsbury system handled 1600 incident reports in the past 12 months, that provided valuable intelligence concerning street based drugs activity and was able to provide early-warning of changes in drug dealing locations and other incident types. It is managed on a day to day basis by a long time local person from within each ward who is connected to or sits on the local Safer Neighbourhoods Panel.

Jim Murray
Bloomsbury Association

I’d also observe that the more reports made by one person or organisation does have an impact. At least to the extent that more senior managers get asked to explain the reasons for the growing volume! Even if the defects don’t get get fixed any faster or at all. One of Westminster’s directors was quite candid at the last West End Area Forum, that they knew that their systems weren’t working very well, especially but not solely in the extended relationships and communications with contractors and then their sub-contractors.

I’d also add that it isn’t just the local councils (and their contractors whether well managed or more typically not) who are involved. Some of the worst problms are caused by the utilities and their contractors – e.g. Thames Water, EdF, NationalGridGas.

One of the requirements I’m specifying for the community association web site (currently very passive and content-lite :-) at http://www.coventgarden.org.uk/ and I’m not convinced of its usabilty let alone accessibility) is to include GIS mapping and plotting for service and campaigning work – linked to image / photo library, to LAs planning, licensing etc applications, environmental defects, outages, greening – and also to member organisations (services or products available), crime, local services, attractions, activities (link with calendar) etc.

D.

2 Making it easier to report and/or complain, and having that clearly visible, and having all reports visible and public, is a good first step. Having alternative reporting services available run by different people – great! Having them directly interface with the relevant public body – even better! It is then the lack of integration starts unravelling everything – with no system or systematic follow through or follow up, reporting back, or effective management. Individual employees, and individual departments, within local authorities can be very good and effective, and get things fixed. But this is usually in spite of the wider bureaucracy, systems, and lack of systems, and in one good example in Camden is of an individual who certainly goes way beyond his job description in trying to get work done.

3 I’m still databasing the data I’ve collected over the last 5 months, but it became pretty clear early on that peoples anecdotal experience in reporting problems by phone, in writing, on pre-paid cards, via the web, via councillors, community associations, etc., was being replicated. The range of experiences include being ignored, being told that something would be done but nothing happening (one egregious example: the notorious rising bollards in James Street Covent Garden, that have not worked for apparently 5 years, despite repeated assurances that they were going to be or had been repaired), and being told the problem was already known about but still nothing happening, the problem being fixed. And invariably there will be no confirmation back that action has been taken, or a defect fixed.

4 I’ve looked at patientopinion, and can see the limitations of relying for example on 1 person’s rating of a hospital.

It reminded me though that in one local forum earlier this year someone asked about local GP surgeries. After some searching I was able to report back:

To find GPs etc, go via http://www.westminster-pct.nhs.uk/services/index.htm Each practice should provide brief details of services, availability etc.

I don’t know of any rating or quality assessments – a gap in the market?

There are walk-in centres: http://www.westminster-pct.nhs.uk/services/walkin.htm

Given that the majority of peoples needs are going to be handled by local doctors, dentists, or the walk-in centres, these would be more a priority for ratings and assessment of their care and treatment.

Dominic

At your suggestion I looked at Patient Opinion website. I checked my local hospital – the North Middlesex. There are two comments: 30 November 2006 and 4 March 07. One was a concrete suggestion for improvements. One a complaint about a relative’s treatment – “my mum was left in a wet bed”.

I’m a local councillor. If you were one of these two people and came to me, what advice should I have given? To put it in your blog? To post a message on a website? Or to use the hospital’s own complaints procedures and insist on a proper investigation of the issues raised?

Of course, there’s no guarantee that such formal procedures will achieve the needed change. But multiplying the outside reporting channels won’t guarantee that either. At least, no more than raising things via a councillor, or the CAB, or your MP, through a host of voluntary agencies, or your local newspaper.

At some point the service itself needs to listen and learn; and to improve the systems it runs.

Of course, as an outsider myself I know it’s a lot easier, less stressful, more fun, and better paid (excluding me) to be outside “advocating” and “facilitating”; than inside actually running a day-to-day service.

Which isn’t an excuse for excluding public criticism and dialogue about services. But I try to remember that multiplying the reporting channels might just worsen the noise-to-signal ratio and even make things worse.

A further vital point. Public dialogue about services needs far more than service users reporting and complaining. There’s a key issue of mutual learning and shared responsibility.

Take the apparently simple issue of reporting dumping so the Council can come round promptly and clear it. I’ve visited cities which are clean because labour is cheap and an army of cleaners constantly sweeps up litter and dumping. And I’ve been in cities which are clean because residents value cleanliness, recycling, civilised public spaces – and accept their own civic responsibility for helping to produce this.

Improved ICT “Access” without improved Civic Pride is just an update of the old Alexei Sayle joke.
“I went to the toilet last week and I’ve posted to the Fix-it website. But the bloody Council *still* haven’t come round to pull the chain.”

Alan