Following the Community Clear Up day last weekend the area was looking great for Myddleton Road Market on Sunday – the challenge is to keep it that way.

Whilst it's not possible (or reasonable) to rally a team of Clear Up volunteers regularly, some incidents of fly tipping, spillages or graffiti should be reported and dealt with quickly. So I explored the options for alerting our local councils to deal with street clean-up concerns.

Neither Enfield nor Haringey publicise a telephone number for reporting street issues – but both invite online reports

The Enfield Borough website is tortuous to navigate. Take for example a simple report of an overflowing bin. Once you find the "Report it" section you have to choose the right one of three options this is the confusingly named: "Reporting a problem on the street, local area, park and open space" which opens an equally confusing sub-menu of thirteen (unlucky!) options … is the problem "filthy and verminous"? Or simply "dumped rubbish"? To be honest I'm not sure I want to get close enough to find out!

Selecting the "dumped rubbish" button opens a further nine-option sub-menu (right) with each of the nine having between two and five additional selections.

Selecting the appropriate one brings you to a page where you are then invited to register with name e-mail address etc – a further administrative barrier which delays the report.

The whole process on the Enfield platform feels almost as if a complex reporting system has been designed to "repel all borders".

The London Borough of Haringey has a website "report it" page too. Using the same example - an overflowing bin - it felt far simpler than the Enfield website to report. There are probably as many options- but navigation is streamlined into a single (long) menu.

Haringey also invite people to report issues on the go – via Twitter on a smart phone or by using a very simple purpose-built App for iPhone or Android which will automatically identify a location and allow camera phone photographs to be uploaded. This is more likely to generate reports than the complicated – desk-top only system on offer from Enfield.

Local authorities look after many public services – so it's understandable that many things are listed as areas of responsibility when reporting a problem, but not all local street issues are the concern of the council – it could be a utility company.

For example if I see a pavement edge lifted and water seeping out, is this a job for the local authority? Or Thames Water? In addition to the complex menus, locally we also have the issue of straddling the edges of two council areas I roughly know where the border is – but I'm not always clear when I cross from Enfield to Haringey.

There is a simpler solution that will work for any issue in any location. www.FixMyStreet.com is a website for reporting common street problems including potholes, broken streetlights and rubbish to the local council, which covers the whole UK.

The great thing is, you don’t need to know who’s responsible for fixing your problem. You just put a pin on a map, (or let your smart phone complete your location) and FixMyStreet sends your report to the right authority.

Unlike the council's own sites any reports are published on the FixMyStreet website, so you can browse your local area and see what the prevalent problems are and what’s been fixed. Additional information can be added by neighbours and you can also upload a photo to help show what the issue is.

TheFix My Street website has been run by UK charity mySociety since 2007 and I'd recommend using it to make sure our local councils and utility suppliers know what needs to fixed quickly and easily.