ePetitions - One year on

Last updated: 6 March 2008

There is a long-established tradition of members of the public presenting petitions at the door of Number 10 Downing Street. The e-Petitions service has been designed to offer a modern parallel, which is more convenient for the petitioner. Unlike paper-based petitions, this service also provides an opportunity for Number 10 to respond to every petitioner via email.

Since its launch in November 2006, the ePetitions site has proved to be a highly popular innovation, helping people communicate with Government and with the Prime Minister's Office. ePetitions has become a part of the landscape of debate in the UK.

The service allows any UK citizen to create a petition and collect signatures via the website. Petitioners are asked to meet basic criteria, but we aim to accept most petitions. The principal reasons for rejecting petitions so far have been obscenity, potential to cause offence, libel or duplication.

Facts and figures

Since its launch, the site has been very busy. The facts and figures to the end of October show:

• Over 29,000 petitions have been submitted, of which over 8,500 are currently live and available for signing, over 6,000 have finished and 14,601 have been rejected outright.
• There have been over 5.8 million signatures, originating from over 3.9 million different email addresses.
• The most common reason for rejection is duplication - many users have commented that there are petitions on similar subjects clogging up the site. We are trying to eliminate too much duplication or overlap, although we need to balance that with the need to allow for the nuances of similar petitions.
• The other common reasons for rejection are: legal issues, offensive language, party political content and issues outside the government's remit.

If a petition is rejected, petitioners are given a chance to reword their petition. Some users choose to resubmit their petitions, some prefer not to.

Speed of response

We have set ourselves the target of processing new petitions within five working days. After a period where this was difficult to achieve due to the high level of demand, we are now within this self-imposed limit.

Delays to individual petitions may occur where there are possible legal issues or questions over the impact of the petition in relation to the Civil Service Code. In a few cases, we have had to seek propriety, ethics and legal advice from appropriate specialists within the Civil Service.

Legal issues

We have had a number of petitions about individual penal sentences. We reject these on the basis that while the PM bears responsibility for sentencing policy, he does not intervene in individual sentences. 

The Attorney General has the power to refer sentences passed in certain serious Crown Court cases to the Court of Appeal for review, but only if satisfied that the sentence was unduly lenient. This power is subject to a strict 28-day time limit from the date that the sentence was passed. Any request for a sentence to be reconsidered should be sent directly to the Attorney General.

Duplicates

An early question for the site's administrators was what to do about petitions that were identical or very similar to ones already on the site. Some users contacted us saying that duplicate petitions should be rejected, because they add confusion and clutter the site. On the other hand, we felt it was unfair to pick one petition from a number of similar proposals, and reject the rest.

As a first step, mySociety, the charity who built the site for us, added a search box to the petition creation process, prompting users to check whether they would like to sign an existing petition before creating a new one. We decided to change the site policy and reject petitions that appear to be duplicates. However, if a user feels strongly that their petition really is different from others, they are still able to resubmit it.

False' petitions and early responses

There have been a number of petitions that are based on premises that are simply not true. This is not always obvious to those who accept or reject petitions and sometimes those are accepted and gain support.

The issue for the petitions team then is whether or not to remove petitions based on an untruth or whether to address that untruth. While the presence of a petition on the Prime Minister's website suggests that it must have a point based in truth, the fact is that we don't censor or edit petitions, and a great number are simply plain wrong.

To try and combat that, we have initiated an early response system to tell users before they sign an ongoing petition that the point it is making is simply untrue. It's a system still in development, but for the most part we feel it is better to engage petitioners rather than remove petitions.

The problem remains however, that users tend to think that the mere presence of a rumour or false story in a petition on the PM's website means that it has some credence or tacit approval of this office. In fact, there are a great number of petitions with which  the Prime Minister's Office disagrees (that is the nature of a petitions system!). 

There are also a good number purely based on newspaper stories or web rumours that have no truth behind them. That is an issue we are still grappling with as we try to reconcile those misconceptions and false allegations with making the creation of petitions easy and accessible, and allowing a wide range of user opinion on the site.

External web links

At the outset, we hoped users would be able to include links to any websites related to a particular organisation or campaign, and mySociety included a special field for links to organisations' web pages. However, the nature and sheer quantity of web links that were being included made it clear that we would have to reconsider.

We simply do not have the resources to vet the content of external sites. This raises both legal risks (if we published the address of a site containing illegal material) and propriety questions (it would be inappropriate for a public website to publish links to commercial products or political campaigns). Reluctantly therefore, we concluded that we had no option but to refuse all URL addresses and links in future petitions.

Honours

We have now made a final decision on honours and appointment petitions.

The Cabinet Office recently launched a campaign asking for people to nominate local heroes who make a difference in their communities for an honour. As there is a well-publicised route for campaigns of this sort, petitioners should use the downloadable forms on the honours website.

Joke petitions

Initially we accepted humorous petitions, on the grounds that they did no harm and were often funny. However, as the site grew in popularity, we found that more and more time was being taken up considering borderline cases where supposedly humorous petitions risked being seen as offensive or in bad taste. Some users also contacted us to complain about silly petitions undermining the serious purpose of the site.

We decided it was impossible to justify this use of Civil Service time, or to come up with clear guidelines as to what amounts to good or bad taste. We have decided no longer to accept petitions that are obviously intended as jokes.

Small petitions

It is fair to say that the number of petitions received happily exceeded our expectations and to keep things both manageable and a justifiable use of resources we have reluctantly decided that we cannot respond to petitions of less than 200 people, unless they relate specifically to small groups (for example, people from a small community).

Similarly, if a petition cannot really be expected to gain a ministerial response - and therefore its purpose is only its existence rather than the response from government - then we will reserve the right to simply not respond.

Reducing the marginal cases

We have to avoid libel, incitement or any other legal issues and we do not have the resources to systematically check the details of individual cases, or to seek legal advice on every contentious petition. So we have erred on the side of caution, asking people to re-phrase petitions if we believe there is any likelihood of legal risk, or of causing offence.

Rejecting petitions that have already been accepted

There have been cases where we have decided to remove previously accepted petitions. Mostly, this has been due to human error and we have sought to correct those errors.

On a couple of occasions, we have rejected petitions because of the way those petitions were being promoted. Petitions were being 'hijacked' by extremists and were promoted in the most offensive terms imaginable. While the petitions themselves weren't provocative, the actions of those supporting them most certainly were. We deemed this to be contrary to the spirit of the petitions site and removed them. This is an action we are prepared to take again if necessary.

Server issues

On occasion, there have been big spikes in traffic where the site has been serving 150 hits per second. This has at times led to some service issues with petitioners getting 'busy' error pages rather than the service they were expecting, but we have been serving the site at 99% reliability. The errors are to be regretted and we are taking steps to minimise interruptions to the service. In general, though, we feel that the numbers who have signed up to petitions show that the site is working pretty robustly, though we are always looking for improvements.

Open source

It's worth reminding users that the code used by mySociety to build this site for us is open source, so other organisations can build a similar site, under the Affero GPL software license. You can download the source code and help develop it. You're welcome to use it in your own projects, although you must also make the source code available to any other such projects.