The very unlucky Mr Packham CBE

Yesterday, I indicated that Chris Packham’s e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting had experienced a long delay between the time that it acquired five signatures (as the process requires) and being published on the Westminster Parliament website.

I’m very, very grateful to ‘a reader’ for this plot of the delays between moderation being completed (getting those five signatures) and publication, for 2179 currently open petitions in the system.

The mean delay is 21 days (median = 20 days) and Chris’s excellent petition was delayed 39 days. The 95th percentile was at 38 days so Chris was in the unluckiest 5% of petitions. But the current all-time record for delay was a petition delayed by 139 days (that’s more than four months!).

Let’s forget about the fact that this is about petitions, and mostly about a petition about which I care. It seems strange to me that a process where lots of entities enter a process, qualify for the next stage and then depend on other people to do the same thing to those qualified (in this case, stick their petition up on a website in the same form as all the others) has such variation in it. I can’t quite understand that.

And I can’t understand why some of the entities that are later in the queue should leap forward ahead of others that are earlier in the queue (as we know they do). So I am puzzled as to what is going on here. Any guesses?

I suppose if there were a team of people working on this process, and I were managing it, then I’d be quite keen to see which team members were involved with how many of the quick and slow publications.

But in any case, if I were managing this process I’d ask the team why some entities got from moderation to publication on the very same day and a few took scores of days – that would seem a perfectly fair question to ask. And there may well be a perfectly fair answer to it – it’s just that (perhaps because of my ignorance of what is involved) I can’t for the life of me figure out what it might be. So, to me at least, it’s a puzzle. I like puzzles, but I most like puzzles that I can solve.

And no, so far, I haven’t asked ‘a reader’ to send me the list of 85 petitions which were even more delayed than Chris’s so that I can look at whether they have anything in common, such as being unpopular with this government, having long words in them or all being submitted by a range of people all of whom are called Chris Packham. I might do that, just out of interest some time.

I don’t think this has helped me to decide whether I favour cock up or conspiracy, so I might well get around to asking the Petitions Committee about this at some time (but I bet they won’t be very forthcoming) and I’m quite busy right now promoting Chris’s much-delayed (for some unexplained but not necesarily inexplicable reason) petition.

Please sign this e-petition by Chris Packham calling for a ban of driven grouse shooting.

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12 Replies to “The very unlucky Mr Packham CBE”

  1. Well firstly I guess some petitions have to be in the 95th percentile for there to be a 95th percentile. If you really wanted to get to the bottom of this you’d probably have to look at the subjects of all the petitions in all the percentiles and try and find some kind of pattern relating the percentile in which they fall to their subject. It might also be that they favour petitions on new subjects – so if there has already been a petition on DGS they might prioritise other petitions which are on subjects that haven’t recently been covered. That would seem reasonable I’d have thought. So there may be more options than ‘cock up’ or ‘conspiracy’.

      1. That’s ok Mark – you did ask for possible explanations and mine seems quite reasonable – I am sure there could well be others beyond your transparently false dichotomy of ‘cock up’ vs ‘conspiracy’.

    1. Giles is spot-on. Less scientifically, I would say that most petitions get done in roughly the same amount of time – about 40 days at a guess from the graph. Anything above 50 days, which isn’t many probably either fell down the back of the filing cabinet, landed on someone’s desk who was off sick or on holiday or required managerial approval for some arcane reason. Difficult to see any conspiracy here and we should beware of trying to find one, I think.

      1. Andy – yes that is clearly less scientific than what the blog says, and monumentally less accurate. 95% of petitions are published in between 0 days and 38 days of reaching the five-signature threshold, and the mean period is 21 days. So, no most petitions don’t ‘get done in the roughly the same amaount of time’ – which is clear from the graph.

        I’m certainly not trying to find a conspiracy, I’m musing on why, in what seems a quite straightforward process, there is such great variety in delay. Try this – why do some petitions get published on the day they reach five signatures and why do some take 38 days?

        1. Well there may some kind of process that they go through – some just pass straight away – whereas others have to get considered further in case they are a duplicate or for other reasons. The conspiracy idea is pretty bananas as it would be so easily detectable by analysis – unless they were really devious and intentionally delayed government friendly petitions as well so as to introduce noise to the data. Perhaps the tendrils of the grouse shooting industry reach as far as the petitions committee but I’d suggest probably not.

          What we CAN say for certain is that the system clearly does not operate as a FIFO queue.

    2. Yet Les Wallace’s petition was up and running well before Chris’s and he’s already had a petition up on the web site and Chris hasn’t had one on this subject before (even though Mark has had two(?) on a similar theme).

  2. I find it bizarre that it isn’t mentioned on the gov website.
    Maybe i missed it but i couldn’t find anything at all on the pre-publication process apart from needing 5 signatures.
    At the risk of stating the obvious. There is some process involved and it must be different according to the topic of the petition otherwise it would just be a queue. So we know there is is some kind of screening. This in itself feels weird. Does that mean that some petitions are refused. Obviously some must if they obscene or are breaking the law but that should minutes to filter not weeks. Other than that it implies some kind of censorship based on topic. If so we should know since the whole point is to highlight openness and democracy.
    Since we don’t know we can only guess and because it is government i would guess that petitions get passed through the department involved in that topic. I would think that the name Chris Packham and the whole General Licence mess would slow everything down as it gets shuffled from desk to desk at DEFRA and with holidays and what …and then it is 39 days.

    1. Chris’s petition might have involved another dept., the BBC.
      I don’t underestimate how much Wild Justice has become a real threat to the government. The cool, rational polite arguments make them look really incompetent and that is not how government wants to be perceived.
      The most innocent explanation is that each petition has to get the OK from each of the 11 committee members but that should still look more like a queue, so i don’t buy it. It has to be something to do with the topics involved.

  3. I’ve noticed this phenomenon for a long time now (not so much with the government’s petition site, but generally). Any matter which may tread on the toes of powerful people, the establishment clique, or whatever you want to call it, faces an endless series of obstacles, distortions, misrepresentations etc.

    Often the central issues are very clear cut, but trying to establish is incredibly difficult. The mainstream media will endlessly prevaricate, misrepresenting the core facts. For example when it comes to the campaign against driven grouse shooting because of the persistent illegal persecution of protected raptors on moors managed for grouse shooting, the campaign will be falsely characterised as “anti-shooting”, against all grouse shooting, about class, that the allegations are largely unsubstantiated. Overall, just trying to establish the basics is like wading through treacle.

    Nor is it just a UK phenomena, because this appears to be how it works, when powerful people are pulling strings behind the scenes. This is what it’s about. We don’t see this, how powerful people who know people, have a word with someone in their social network, lobby, bring pressure to bear etc.

    Mark says “I don’t think this has helped me to decide whether I favour cock up or conspiracy”.

    I think the whole conception of conspiracy is deeply unhelpful. In reality most distortion of matters of public interest doesn’t involved the classic model of conspiracy, and it’s really doubtful whether this mode of conspiracy happens outside the pages of fiction, because real conspirators are far too savvy and know such a conspiracy could blow up in their face.

    People in influential positions have cliques, social networks of people they know, and who they socialise with, and who have common interests. The higher up the ladder you go, the smaller these social networks are, and the more likely it is that someone knows someone, who knows someone, and influence is brought to bear, without it ever leaving any traceable paper trail.

    It would have been so easy to have clamped down on illegal raptor persecution years ago, using the tried and tested way governments use to address issues like this. Sterner punishments, loopholes closed, additional powers for the police, better funding. Absolutely the only reason this hasn’t happened, is because of this behind the scenes manoeuvring.

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