12/7/23 

Residents who have downloaded the Cardiff Gov app on their mobile devices can now report issues with street lighting in the city.

The latest release of the app, available to download on the Google Play Store or Apple's App store, allows residents to quickly and conveniently tell the Council about a street lighting fault, pinpointing its exact location on in-app map.

The new function is the latest to be added to the app, which has now been downloaded almost 77,000 times since its launch, with almost 1,400 downloads last month alone.

The street lighting reporting joins a host of other functions on the app, including checking your waste collection day, telling us about persistent problem parking, reporting dog fouling and even managing your council tax account.

Cabinet Member for Finance, Modernisation and Performance, Cllr Chris Weaver, said: "The council is constantly looking at ways to make it as easy as possible for residents to engage with us, whether that's reporting issues like fly-tipping or finding out opening times for our recycling centres.

"The street light fault reporting on the newest release of the app is latest way we're making it easier for customers to contact us, at a time that suits them. I'd encourage anyone yet to download the app to get it now. It's really useful and we're adding services to the app all the time."

With the Cardiff Gov app, reports are automatically routed to the right team in the Council allowing us to resolve them in the least amount of time. The app is just one of digital ways residents and customers can get in touch with the Council.

The Council's chatbot, BOBi, handled a total of 5,194 conversations in May, mainly requesting information Council Tax, recycling centres and missed collections. New functions, enabling BOBi to answer a wider range of queries on different council services are regularly added and improvements to information on housing and road closures will be available shortly.

In May, 244,000 people visited www.cardiff.gov.uk and viewed 531,000 pages, with 71.4% of the visits being accessed on a mobile device. 100% of graffiti reports received by the Council were completed online last month and 98.9% (23,000) of recycling centre bookings were made online.

A total of 24,000 online payments were received via the website, totalling £3.3million. 7,500 online forms were submitted via the website, which is an increase of 1,400 compared to May last year.

While trends show that more and more customers are choosing to contact the Council digitally, the council's contact centre Connect to Cardiff (C2C) answered almost 23,000 calls last month, including the centre's nine millionth call since the operation began in 2001.