'My Nan's House Has Vanished': Bristol Residents Speak Out as Duplicate Image Error Erases Homes From Council Records

Homeowners across Bristol have spent weeks trying to correct a glitch in the council's online planning portal that has swapped out genuine photographs of their properties with a single duplicate image — in some cases, a generic picture of a semi-detached house in a completely different part of the city. The fault, which community groups in Easton and Bedminster say they first noticed in late May 2026, has affected planning application records, listed building entries, and conservation area documentation held on Bristol City Council's public-facing portal.

The timing matters. Bristol is in the middle of a contentious local plan review, with dozens of planning applications currently live across neighbourhoods from St Pauls to Knowle West. Accurate photographic records are used by planning officers, conservation assessors, and objectors alike when evaluating the visual impact of proposed developments. Getting them wrong is not a trivial administrative inconvenience.

For people in streets like Raleigh Road in Southville and stretches of Fishponds Road in Fishponds, the duplicate images have muddied formal objections they filed against nearby development proposals. One community group, the Easton Community Association based on Greenbank Road, has been helping residents log complaints with the council's planning department since mid-June. The Knowle West Media Centre has separately been assisting older residents unfamiliar with online portal navigation to document and report the errors on their own properties.

What the Fault Actually Looks Like

The error appears systematic rather than random. Instead of a property's own photograph — uploaded when an application was first submitted or when a building was logged in the local heritage register — the portal displays a repeated image, the same file apparently overwriting entries across multiple postcodes. In parts of Totterdown, a Victorian terrace streetscape photograph has reportedly replaced images for at least a dozen separate addresses, according to accounts collated by the Totterdown Residents Association in June 2026.

Bristol City Council's planning portal is built on the Idox Uniform system, a platform used by local authorities across England. Idox, headquartered in Glasgow, provides the back-end infrastructure that councils customise. A software update rolled out to several English councils in April 2026 has been identified by council IT staff — according to a written response sent to a resident in Bishopston, a copy of which has been seen by The Daily Bristol — as the likely trigger for the duplicate replacement fault. The council's response, dated 17 June 2026, stated that a technical review was ongoing and advised affected applicants to resubmit images directly to the case officer handling their application.

That guidance has frustrated residents who feel the burden of fixing a systemic error should not fall on individuals. Bristol City Council holds roughly 180,000 active planning and property records on the portal, based on figures the council published in its 2024-25 digital services annual report. Even if only a fraction of those entries have been affected, the administrative backlog of manual resubmissions could take months to clear.

Community Groups Pushing for a Fix

The Easton Community Association has written formally to the council requesting a published timeline for restoring correct images and an audit confirming which records were affected. The group is asking for the council to notify property owners directly rather than waiting for residents to discover the error themselves when checking their own entries.

In Cliftonwood and Hotwells, where conservation area status makes photographic accuracy particularly significant for heritage assessments, the local residents' association has flagged the issue to Historic England's regional office, asking whether the portal errors could compromise scheduled monument or listed building records held jointly by the council and the national body.

For anyone who has submitted a planning application or heritage enquiry since April 2026 and wants to check whether their property photograph has been correctly recorded, the council advises logging into the Bristol City Council planning search at planningonline.bristol.gov.uk and searching by postcode. If the displayed image does not match the property, residents should email the planning contact centre directly with the correct photograph attached, referencing their application or property reference number. The council's planning contact centre is currently operating with an acknowledged backlog, with written responses taking up to 15 working days.