New research published by SocietyWorks explores whether and how citizens are making reports about issues in their community, and their current expectations for local authority reporting services.

Based on a nationwide YouGov survey commissioned by SocietyWorks, the report, Citizen reporting in the UK 2022, found that the top three things citizens want from a reporting service is for it to know where a report needs to be sent (48% of respondents thought this would be useful), to be easy to use on a mobile device (43%) and to be able to receive updates on the progress of their reports (38%).

At the opposite end of the scale, the features least wanted by citizens when it comes to reporting local issues are a dedicated mobile app (asked for by only 22% of respondents) and the ability to see reports for different services in one place (just 9% of respondents).

When asked about whether they have reported any issues recently, the majority of citizens surveyed said they had not. For respondents aged between 18-24, this was mainly because they don’t know how to report a problem, but the most popular reason was because a previously reported problem was never fixed, with people living in cities particularly likely to believe that reporting is not a worthwhile task.

However, the survey also found that the majority of citizens do care about fixing issues within their local neighbourhood. 74% of respondents said that improving where they live would motivate them to make reports, regardless of whether they ever have before.

When asked more about the importance of receiving report updates, the survey found that 71% of people would choose to not send follow-up emails or make phone calls if they were kept informed about a problem’s journey to resolution.

Alex Parsons, senior researcher at mySociety, SocietyWorks’ parent charity, said: 'Citizen reports of problems both help citizens feel guardianship over their area, and alert authorities to problems. Managing the feedback loop and the expectations of citizens is important because problems being reported and not fixed makes citizens less likely to report again.

'The philosophy of our services is that citizens should not need to understand how overlapping systems of government work to report problems, and this is validated by a strong support for a tool that can route the request to the right place.

'Making it easy to report problems and keep citizens informed about progress improves the relationship between local councils and citizens and means citizens don’t need to follow-up through other methods.'

Councils that are keen to transform their service delivery for citizens can carry some key priorities forward from this research to help them harness the full potential of proactive citizen-made reports, without increasing the burden on customer services teams.

Read the full report, Citizen reporting in the UK 2022, here.