Medway’s new AI search fell over almost immediately
The council’s shiny new search box served up stale information, plus Full Council next week, planning, news in brief, and more
Medway Council’s new AI website search was meant to make finding information easier, but early testing produced wrong answers on basic democratic information and surfaced outdated civic details. We look at what went wrong, what the council says it has fixed, and what this suggests about putting AI on top of messy public websites, alongside the week's council business, the latest planning application, news in brief, and more.
Medway’s new AI search fell over almost immediately
Medway Council’s new AI website search is, we are assured, here to drag the council website into the 21st century.
That would be more convincing if it had not immediately started rummaging around in the 20th.
Launched this week as part of the council’s wider Medway 2.0 digital push, the new search bar is meant to help residents find information faster. It can take typed questions, voice commands and queries in more than 70 languages. The council says it will improve accessibility, make the website easier to use and reduce avoidable calls and emails to customer services.
All of which sounds perfectly reasonable. Unless you're a local journalist, council websites are rarely anyone’s idea of a good time. If residents can get to the right answer without having to dig through six PDFs, three committee papers and a page last updated during the coalition government, so much the better.
The snag is that if you slap an AI layer over a messy public website without being very sure what it is drawing from, you are not modernising anything. You are just automating the mess.
And, in early testing, Medway’s new search managed to get itself into a muddle rather quickly.
Some routine service questions were fine. Ask it the kind of thing residents actually use council websites for, and it often seemed to cope well enough. But move into democratic information, and things got ropey fast.
Asked who the opposition was at Medway Council, it decided Labour were the opposition, and the Conservatives were the ruling party. Asked about Rehman Chishti, it identified him as the MP for Gillingham and Rainham, despite his losing the seat in 2024. Asked about Nick Bowler, it returned him as a councillor, despite his death in 2021. In another case, it surfaced former councillor Alan Jarrett’s personal contact details in response to a query about him.
That is not really 'AI can make mistakes' territory. That is more 'perhaps someone should have kicked the tyres before launch' territory.
Because this is the thing with council AI. It does not need to become sentient and start planning the downfall of local democracy to be a problem. It only needs to sound confident while being wrong. If a resident asks a straightforward question on the council’s own website, they should not have to wonder whether the answer has been stitched together from an old election page, an archived speaker listing and the ghosts of councillors past.
To be fair to Medway, the council has acknowledged there was an issue. It told us that the tool had been pulling information from old election results pages, which led to errors when questions were phrased in certain ways or asked about specific names rather than more general topics.
A fix, it said, has now been put in place.
The council also said the wording of a question can influence which pages the system draws from. In other words, if you ask it one way, you get the right answer. Ask it another way, and off it wanders into the archives.
That is useful as an explanation, but less helpful as a defence. Residents are not going to approach a council website as if they were trying to crack a prompt-engineering puzzle. The whole point of this sort of tool is that it deals sensibly with normal human questions. If it only behaves when the user happens to phrase something exactly right, that is not really smart search. It is just a touchy search.
In the Jarrett example, the council said the contact details came from the 'Find a public speaker' section of the website, where they were publicly available and included at the request of the people listed. It added that they can be removed upon request by those individuals.
That is true as far as it goes. It is also slightly beside the point. Plenty of things may technically be public somewhere on a council website. That does not automatically mean an AI answer box should be enthusiastically pulling them out and sticking them front and centre.
The council said the system had gone through testing before launch, including more than 1,250 questions or statements and 210 keywords, and that council services and a cross-party member group had also been involved in testing.
Which is all well and good, though it does make it slightly awkward that it took no great feat of investigative genius to name former officeholders as current ones.
Still, credit where it is due. We reran the same problematic queries today, and they now appear to be fixed. Medway says the system includes back-office reporting and evaluation features to monitor and improve responses, and notes that each answer includes a warning that AI can make mistakes, along with source links showing where the information comes from.
A Medway Council spokesperson told Local Authority: “As with many launches, we have seen some initial teething problems, but remain confident that the search function is safe and reliable. All of the information returned is publicly available on our website, and where issues have been flagged, we have been able to deliver fixes within hours. We would encourage anyone who comes across a potential issue to please use the feedback form to help improve the new function over time.”
That is the good news for Medway. The less good news is that this still looks like an AI tool launched before the council had done enough of the really dull but really necessary housekeeping underneath it.
The issue is not that Medway has used AI. Plenty of councils are doing that or are about to. The issue is that council websites are full of historical clutter, half-forgotten pages and legacy information that make perfect sense in context but become a liability when a generative search tool starts hoovering them up.
So yes, Medway moved quickly once the problems were pointed out. It deserves some credit for that. But a search tool that can be thrown off by old election pages and stale civic information was not especially well implemented in the first place.
This was not a disaster. It was something more mundane and, in its own way, more council: a shiny new digital fix laid on top of untidy old systems, then patched in a hurry once someone noticed the obvious problems.
Council matters
Meetings next week:
- Thursday: Kent and Medway Police and Crime Panel will discuss the recent inspection of Kent Police.
- Thursday: Full Council will debate buying hundreds of social homes, changes to the petition system, and motions on social care costs and political violence.
New planning applications:
- Outline application for 45 homes west of Formby Road in Halling.
- Change of use proposal for the former Post Office on Watling Street, Gillingham, into a takeaway, the subtly named YOU WANT BEEF?
- Plans for a new teaching block at Leigh Academy, Rainham.
- New cash machine at the Nationwide in Gillingham High Street.
- Just one HMO application this week, for Blenheim Avenue in Chatham.
In brief
🍷 The former landlords of the Rising Sun in Rochester are set to open the Bohemian, a new cafe and wine bar in the former Mrs Slocombe's cat cafe in Intra.
🍻 The Angel pub in Rainham has reopened with its fifth landlord in the space of five years.
🛒 Okay, it's not strictly Medway, but Costco is consulting on opening its first Kent store down the road in Aylesford.
Property of the week
This two-bedroom terrace in Cliffe is on the market for £300,000 and, judging by the photos, has been home to someone who takes reading very seriously. It’s a compact, characterful place with an open-plan living and dining space, wood floors, an open fireplace, and a kitchen that looks out onto a well-established garden. There’s a lean-to for the practical bits of life, and upstairs two double bedrooms, one with open-field views that may not last. You also get a driveway, which is never not a win, and the overall impression is of a house that has been lived in rather than staged into blandness. If you want village quiet, scenic walks and the sort of home that suits a bookshelf habit, this could be the one.
Events this week
🥕 Sun 19 Apr - Rochester Farmers’ Market // Wide range of traders selling food and gifts. Blue Boar Lane car park, Rochester. Free.
🎸 Thu 23 Apr - The Love Family // Legendary Medway band play tiny show. 12 Degrees Micropub, Rochester. Free, donations welcome.
Footnotes
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