I’ve been a bit bad when it comes to updating my blog! Got some good news to share with you though. Resident satisfaction with our key services continues to improve. Satisfaction with street cleaning is now 11 points higher than the average for London and only 3 points behind the highest it’s ever been in Lewisham. 63 % of our residents said that they thought cleaning standards in Lewisham were either ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. This builds on an upward trend from 2002. Although I’m really pleased with this, it won’t feel right until we’ve got beyond 70% and heading towards 80%. Our other services also performed really well. Satisfaction with our parks and open spaces has surpassed the London average for the first time in many years. The second graph demonstrates that we haven’t achieved these improvements by chucking money at the service. Performance and resident satisfaction has improved way beyond the (below inflation) increases in spend (which must make me Mr Gershon!)
January 4, 2008, 12:02 pm
Filed under: Love Lewisham
Councillors in Toronto, Canada are hoping to introduce an initiative inspired by our ‘Love Lewisham’ work. An article in the Ontario ‘Globe and Mail’ says that Councillors Cesar Palacio and Joe Mihevc want to emulate our approach and help keep their city clean. ( I am available for any benchmarking visits that might be required!)
November 24, 2007, 9:29 am
Filed under: Love Lewisham
When we launched Love Lewisham a few years ago, the Mayor, Steve Bullock announced that we were waging ‘War Against Graffiti’. I was a bit apprehensive about making such a bold claim, and some of my colleagues were a bit worried about our capacity to cope with the flood of reports that we were inviting. Of course, much of the publicity focused around allowing residents to post images onto our site, and the idea of making it ‘easier’ for the public to report things. Behind the scenes though, we have been working hard to tap into the potential reporting capacity of hundreds of council staff and partners. Make it easy for residents to report stuff, but work to make it unnecessary for them to need to. After a deluge of reports last year, and some real pressure on our graffiti service, things have started to settle-down.
Reports of graffiti have fallen by about 30% this year.
This is against a record-year in 2006.
Metres removed and the number of jobs has also fallen.
Less graffiti has been observed from our own monitoring, down from 12.29% last year, to 9.43% this year
Independent monitoring (EnCams) shows a similar trend, down from 16% last year to 9.5% this year.
What’s going on?;
Ease of reporting ‘Love Lewisham’
Many more people reporting through ‘Love Lewisham’
Pro-active removal (Quad-bike etc)
Involvement of Safer Neighbourhood Teams and their activity (reporting graffiti to us and prosecuting taggers)
Taggers are being deterred (graffiti won’t stay in place, so why bother?)
When graffiti is reported, it’s removed faster than ever.
I’m particularly pleased with these results, which I think demonstrates that this kind of technology can be used to help transform service delivery.
November 2, 2007, 7:56 pm
Filed under: Love Lewisham
Here’s an extract from this week’s Love Lewisham performance data. It shows a really nice distribution of reports coming-in from refuse workers, Community Support Officers, Members, Town Centre Managers and residents. The pressure is really starting to build now. Will we be able to deliver? I reckon we will! I suppose that’s what they mean by ‘Transformational Government, Enabled by IT’ !
October 11, 2007, 11:43 am
Filed under: Love Lewisham
Dreaming Spires Love Lewisham!
Oxford City Council have been inspired by our ‘Love Lewisham’ work and launched their own version:
The city council’s online communications officer, Shey Cobley, said: “The idea for our photo-reporting website came from the Love Lewisham site.
“This is hosted by Lewisham Council and it allows residents to report issues of concern through a dedicated website.
“Since they introduced it they have seen three times as much graffiti removed, in half the time. This is because they were able to target their resources more effectively, as the photos clearly showed how big the problem was and what was needed to deal with it.” You can read the article here:
October 10, 2007, 1:25 pm
Filed under: Love Lewisham
EURIM ‘transformational government’ Parliamentary session on 6th December.
Are there any Love Lewisham users out there who would be prepared to come along to meeting a ‘transformational government’ Parliamentary session on 6th December and share their ‘Love Lewisham’ experience from a public user perspective?I’ve been asked to attend and represent the Council for the following session:
“presentation of evidence to the session via a panel of MPs, and the desired outcomes that will inform the process and reflect LoveLewisham’s achievements, e.g. in terms of citizen involvement, the applicability of the LoveLewisham model to other councils, and the problems you encountered setting up the scheme. It would be most advantageous if you could bring along a citizen of Lewisham as a representative beneficiary of the scheme.In terms of the structure of the session, we envisage that you will be invited to join other witnesses in the Thatcher Room, to present your evidence and respond to questions from parliamentarians.
I’ve just noticed that one of our Councillors is not only using his ‘Love Lewisham’ device to report graffiti to us, but is actually removing it himself and then posting the picture to our ‘Love Lewisham’ site! Cllr Keogh from the Ladywell ward was issued with a device several months ago and has been sending us plenty of reports. I’m sure that Cllr Keogh has been doing this sort of thing for years, but now, through Love Lewisham, we can all share his efforts! Thanks Cllr Keogh.
We went up to the Emirates Stadium with our Cabinet Member Susan Wise on Thursday evening and were rewarded with another Silver Gilt award for the Council‘s trophy cabinet. The competition is always really tough, so we were thrilled to do so well again.
Top horticultural judges had descended on Lewisham on Wednesday (12 July) and visited the borough’s best sites
Steve Bullock. Mayor of Lewisham. said ‘we won in 2003 and made it to the Britain in Bloom finals in 2004
‘Having picked up the Silver Gilt Award last year, coming joint top with Richmond and Kensington and Chelsea we are determined to keep up the momentum “. I‘m sure Sir Steve will be very pleased!
‘Love Lewisham’ is now being used by our refuse and recycling truck drivers to report fly-tipping, graffiti and other environmental crime. This is great for helping manage these services as these guys visit every street in the borough at least once a week. They’ve really helped us improve our environment and continue to improve resident satisfaction.
