Connecting to FixMyStreet

About FixMyStreet

FixMyStreet is an independent web service run by the charity mySociety to make it easier for anyone to report a problem in their local area without needing to have any knowledge of council boundaries or responsibilities.

mySociety’s commercial arm, SocietyWorks, runs tailored FixMyStreet Pro services alongside the FixMyStreet network, offering integrated features designed to reduce unnecessary reporting and to enable better report triaging for UK local authorities.

You can find the answers to many of our most frequently asked questions on our FAQ page.

Do you have an idea for a business or website that could use data from or contribute data to FixMyStreet?

Over FixMyStreet’s twenty year history, we’ve been approached by lots of people excited about the potential for digital engagement on local problems, often with their own take on the issue reporting process. With the increase in AI vibe coding, we’re seeing this more frequently.

But, as a small charity, running a number of pieces of what are effectively national civic infrastructure, we need to make very conscious decisions about who we work with and where we invest our time.

Below you’ll find a quick summary of how we respond to requests for ideas, partnerships and endorsements relating to FixMyStreet:

Suggesting an improvement to FixMyStreet

If you have an idea that would improve FixMyStreet, check whether it is already a feature of FixMyStreet Pro, or has been suggested before in our issue tracker. If your idea hasn’t been suggested before, submit it as a new feature request, under “New issue” in the issue tracker.

FixMyStreet is an open source project, and you’re welcome to submit a pull request with improvements you’ve made to our code. However, for non-trivial changes, we strongly encourage you to submit a new issue where it can be discussed first, to avoid you spending time implementing changes that can’t be merged. Note also that we do not have capacity to review long, AI-generated pull requests, so please keep your changes short and focussed, and provide a clear rationale for why the changes will benefit FixMyStreet users.

Sending reports into FixMyStreet from a website or app you have built

If you’ve built a website or app that needs to submit reports to the local authorities on FixMyStreet, and are wondering whether we offer an API for this, the answer is no.

We’d encourage you to simply link your users to FixMyStreet so that they can pick the location and category of report, and FixMyStreet’s built-in deduplication and redirection features can guide them towards the smoothest outcome.

We strongly discourage you from automatically posting reports on FixMyStreet, especially in high volumes – these pose significant problems for already stretched local authorities, and are liable to be simply ignored. It is much more effective to work with local authorities, and submit a reasonable number of the most urgent reports, rather than drowning them in hundreds of reports they can’t effectively triage.

Receiving reports from FixMyStreet

FixMyStreet supports Open311 both as a client (sending reports made on the site to an external service via the Open311 protocol), and partly as a server (returning reports made on the site when queried via the Open311 protocol).

Read more about FixMyStreet’s Open311 API, and how you can use it to route FixMyStreet reports directly into backend systems.

Extracting data from FixMyStreet into your own website or app

If you want report data out of FixMyStreet, then you can use FixMyStreet’s Open311 API. Open311 is an international open standard for exchanging public realm reports between systems. We strongly discourage you from scraping FixMyStreet, and will block IP addresses that abuse our site.

Please also note that FixMyStreet is just one of a number of channels through which problems might be reported to local authorities, so you cannot infer council responsiveness or local road conditions from FixMyStreet reports alone.

Endorsements and recommendations

Sorry, but we are not able to endorse or recommend businesses or websites.

Partnerships

If you’re a public body or third sector organisation who would like a custom-branded version of FixMyStreet for your users (such as the ones we run for Transport For London and National Highways), then contact SocietyWorks about our commercial offerings.

We cannot partner with other reporting tools, but we are happy to explore partnerships with other system providers, such as asset management systems, where the partnership offers a clear benefit to the public and to the authorities receiving reports from FixMyStreet. Please contact SocietyWorks to discuss a potential partnership.