'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

Email ai-knowledge-hub@dsit.gov.uk to:

  • find out how to use or collaborate on this tool
  • talk to us about your own tool

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