The online problem reporting system allows residents (and parish councils) to report problems relating to Highways (potholes, dirty road signs, unemptied pavement bins and non-working street lights) and Countryside (unemptied bins in parks and footpaths). You can access the system HERE from a PC or mobile device. Just select the category from a list and find/click the incident location on a map.
You can (and ideally should) upload photos for pothole cases but should only try to measure them if is safe (guidance HERE).
You’ll receive an email acknowledgement, giving an indicative response time. The incident is then reviewed and assigned a priority. A non-working pelican crossing, or a serious pothole
for example, should be dealt with within a few hours of reporting, whilst a less serious pothole may take 28 days. There’s more on how these are prioritised HERE.
You’ll receive email updates as the incident progresses. If it is deemed a duplicate of a problem reported by others or dealt with already, you will be informed.
You can nominate other people to receive notifications of the incident’s progress. The council doesn’t currently support the use of third-party apps. to raise problems, nor phoned-in incidents, other than for out of hours emergencies.
If you experience problems with the service – for example a “case closed” for no obvious reason – or an unusually poor response time, please let me know, forwarding the relevant incident email(s) to me HERE.
When the council receives a “report-a-problem” enquiry (per the process shown separately) it starts an (up to) three step process:
1: It writes to the landowner asking for the vegetation (or other nuisance/obstruction) to be removed within 14 days. It also informs the initial enquiry of its action and closes the incident. The council aims to check the issue at the end of the grace period.
2: If no action was taken, the council writes again, citing the Highways Act, asking for action to be
taken within 14 days.
3: If action is still not taken the Council will take action to remove the nuisance and look to recover costs from the landowner.
Note: The council receives a lot of customer enquiries on various “highway” issues, and there are a number of vacancies within the team at present, so it must prioritise its workload. This can mean that follow up time of these nuisance and obstruction incidents is behind the target intervals shown above. I’m exploring possible ways to speed up this process, including the possibility of making use of parish councils’ local knowledge and service providers.