Duplicate Images on Coventry's Council Website Are Costing Residents Time and Trust

Coventry City Council's public-facing web pages carry hundreds of duplicate and mismatched images — stock photos used repeatedly across unrelated service pages, broken thumbnails on planning application notices, and outdated photographs of demolished buildings still appearing on neighbourhood information pages. For residents trying to navigate council services online, the result is a digital environment that erodes confidence before they have even read a single word of official guidance.

The issue matters now because Coventry's local authority completed a major digital transformation programme in 2024, migrating legacy content onto a new content management system. That migration, which affected pages covering everything from bin collection to licensing applications, carried across years of unaudited image libraries. Duplicate image replacement — the systematic process of identifying, removing and replacing redundant or misleading visuals — was not completed before the new platform went live, according to council documentation published on the authority's transparency portal.

Where the Problem Shows Up Across the City

The effects are visible in specific, concrete ways. The planning portal pages covering the Friargate regeneration zone, the area surrounding Coventry Railway Station on Station Square, still carry a render from 2019 showing a building that has since been substantially redesigned. The Binley Road community hub page, which signposts residents in the Binley and Willenhall ward to local support services, uses a generic photograph of a community centre interior that does not correspond to the actual venue. Neither image is labelled with a date or source credit.

Coventry Libraries' branch pages present a different version of the same problem. Several branch listings — including the one for Tile Hill Library on Jardine Crescent — share an identical header image pulled from a central archive, making it harder for first-time visitors to distinguish one branch from another at a glance. Accessibility advocates have long argued that image duplication is not a cosmetic issue: under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018, all meaningful images on public authority websites must carry accurate alternative text, and a duplicated image frequently carries duplicated or absent alt-text, directly failing users who rely on screen readers.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, which the 2018 regulations adopt as their standard, require that images conveying information meet a minimum contrast and descriptive threshold. A council audit carried out internally and referenced in the authority's Digital Accessibility Statement — last updated in March 2025 — acknowledged 47 outstanding image-related accessibility failures across the main council domain. The statement set a remediation target of December 2025. That deadline has passed.

What Residents Can Do and What Should Happen Next

For Coventry residents, the practical consequences are straightforward. Anyone using the council website to check planning permissions near Earlsdon or Foleshill, to find the correct contact for a housing repair, or to locate a children's centre in Radford, may be looking at images that do not accurately represent the service or location they are trying to reach. That is a navigational problem before it becomes a legal one.

Residents who find a misleading or broken image on a council page can report it directly through the council's website feedback tool, accessible via the footer of every page on coventry.gov.uk. Each report is logged and — according to the council's published service standards — should receive an acknowledgement within five working days.

The longer-term fix requires a structured duplicate image audit with a published completion date. Other English cities of comparable size, including Leicester City Council, have published rolling image review schedules tied to their annual accessibility reporting cycles. Coventry does not yet have an equivalent public commitment on record.

Community groups with a stake in accurate online representation — including the Coventry Older Voices network, which has previously raised digital inclusion concerns with the council, and disability advocacy organisations active across the CV1 to CV6 postcode areas — would be well placed to formally request an updated accessibility statement before the end of the 2026 calendar year. The council is legally required to publish a refreshed statement annually. The clock is running.