'Report It' Assistant

Simplifying reporting of street issues using image classification

    The challenge

    The 'Report it' service allows residents, businesses, and visitors to report street issues like fly-tipping, graffiti, animal fouling and street noise. However, the process required users to fill out forms and manually select the issue type, making it time-consuming and prone to errors. This discouraged reporting and led to delays in resolution when issues were misclassified.

    The solution

    The 'Report it' Assistant (RIA) uses AI to automatically identify the type of issue using a combination of image classification (on user-uploaded photos) and natural language understanding. This removes the need for users to manually select categories, speeding up the reporting process. It also ensures accurate onward triage and action, improving the overall resident experience.

    The results

    The AI correctly identified the report category in 86% of cases, leading to a 38% reduction in time spent selecting the right category and a 20% drop in the number of steps required. Overall, the average time to report an issue fell from 3.65 minutes to 1.37 minutes.

    Learnings / insights

    • Incident triage is a feasible and effective opportunity space for machine-learning application.

    Details

    Organisation name
    Westminster City Council
    Government body
    Local Government
    User group
    General public
    Use case type
    Reusable
    Type of technology
    Machine Learning
    Phase
    Live
    Impact
    Better Customer experience / Time savings

    Links

    Get in touch

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    Content created: 10 May 2025| Last updated: 18 May 2025