Half the time it isn’t the council.

A pothole on a red route belongs to Transport for London. Fifty metres away it belongs to the borough. Nobody signposts the difference, so reports go to the wrong place and quietly die there. This works out who actually owns the road, then files it with them.

Commercial Road, E1 — part of the TLRN

Transport for London

Red route

Any borough road in Kensington & Chelsea

Streetline, RBKC

Any borough road in Southwark

London Borough of Southwark

FixMyStreet

How it works

Photograph the problem. That is the whole roadside job. No forms, no typing, no signal needed — it is stored on your phone until you are somewhere warm.
The location comes from the photo, not from where you are standing. Read from the image’s own EXIF data, so a report you triage at home still points at the pothole. If the photo has no location, it asks you rather than guessing.
It works out the authority and files it. Borough boundaries and the 20,629 segments of TfL’s road network are checked on your phone, offline. Then it sends the report by whichever route that authority actually accepts.

What you can report

Road surface

Potholes, broken footways, worn markings, damaged signs.

Lighting

Street lights out, failed illuminated signs and bollards.

Drainage

Blocked gullies, standing water, flooding.

Rubbish

Fly-tipping, litter, graffiti, overflowing bins.

Obstruction

Skips, scaffolding, overgrown vegetation, abandoned vehicles.

Parking

Vehicles blocking a cycle lane, a footway, or a dropped kerb.

All of it civil. Nothing here is a criminal allegation, a dangerous-driving report or a request to prosecute anybody. If you want to report a driving offence, that is the Met’s job, not ours.

What happens to your photograph

Number plates and faces are blurred on your phone, before anything is uploaded. The unblurred original never leaves the device, so there is no copy of it to lose.

No registration number is ever stored. Not hashed, not encrypted — there is no field for one. It is passed to the authority with the report and then it is gone.

The council replies to you, not to us. You are the person making the report. We are the envelope.

There are no cookies, no analytics and no third-party scripts on this website. The privacy notice explains the rest in full.

Who runs this

Usama, a cyclist in London. It started because reporting a pothole meant registering an account with a different council every time, and I wanted to stop losing reports to that.

It is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by any local authority, by Transport for London, or by any government body.

It is not open to the public yet. The routing data covering all 34 authorities is complete and published in the open; the app itself is still being tested. If you want to know when it opens, or you work for an authority and would rather reports arrived somewhere specific, email hello@tellthecouncil.uk.

If you work for a council, start here