After…things I would like to be different (5)

After coronavirus (which might be quite a long way away), or at least when the world settles down to a new normal, there are some things that I’d like to be different. So over the next days and weeks I’m going to write them down. They will mostly be to do with our relationship with the natural world (but not exclusively).

If you would like to have a go at writing a guest blog on a thing that you would like to be different then please take notice of these general guidelines for guest blogs and send it to me at [email protected] for consideration. I’ll give priority to offers that relate to the natural environment, and/or to those that are well-written (IMHO).

The Westminster Petitions System

I’m a keen supporter of the idea that an ordinary citizen can initiate a petition to parliament which, if supported by enough fellow citizens, then receives a response from government. This seems to me to be a modern manifestation of an ancient right which goes back to and beyond Magna Carta.

The current process is only around a decade old and has generally evolved and improved over time.

The process is essentially this:

• anyone can submit a petition which needs to meet a few sensible criteria
• a petition is published (after a very variable time period) and then is ‘live’ for 6 months unless a general election intervenes to curtail things.
• if a petition gets 10,000 signatures then a government department will eventually produce a response
• if a petition gets 100,000 signatures then it receives a Westminster Hall debate where a shadow government minister and a government minister have an allotted time to respond to the petition.
• and then, almost always, nothing happens.

There are some very good things about this process:

• it exists
• it is quite efficient
• the technology works very well with instant updating of signature count and superb maps of where signatures come from
• the triggering of a government response at 10,000 signatures, however awful and evasive, is an excellent thing
• the debates are substantial in terms of time

But there are some improvements that could, and should, be made:

1. Good petitions can easily be overlooked: there are many petitions and it is time-consuming to look through them all – and I bet you don’t, do you? Therefore, it is really up to the person with a burning urge to right a perceived wrong to find a way to publicise their petition. There is not a perfect correlation between people having good ideas and people having the money, contacts, time, nous or social media strength to promote their good idea. If you want the process to be fair and powerful then this should worry you – so it worries me and it should worry the petitions committee. My solution?: tag each petition with the government department who will have to respond (easy!) and enable the petitions website to be searched by government department.
2. Is this a UK or an England petition site?: the answer is that it is both, but that isn’t a very helpful answer even though it reflects the situation which pertains within the UK. Some issues are dealt with on a UK basis (eg foreign policy, Brexit, defence) and it is wholly appropriate for them to be dealt with by UK petitions to the UK parliament and to get some type of response from the UK government. But there are other issues, many other issues including driven grouse shooting, which are UK issues but each UK legislature has the ability to address mattters itself. And in these cases it seems odd that DEFRA responds in a way that disguises whether it thinks it is giving a UK view (which it can’t really) or an England view. I am really not sure how to improve this matter, but I do think it needs improving. One could limit petitions on subjects which are devolved responsibility to England only constituents and leave matters of UK parliament competence as UK petitions – I can see advantages and disadvantages. Or one could invite a response from the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland governments on issues that are devolved – I’d like that, but I guess there would be an awful lot of harrumphing involved from all sides given that it is the UK parliament that set up this petition system (not the government) and other nations have their own parliaments. It would help if MPs with constituencies outside England contributed properly to the Westminster Hall debates. As I say, it’s a tricky issue. I feel compelled to note in passing that every time there is a UK petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting then the number of signatures coming from Scottish constituencies always vastly outnumbers those that supported licensing of grouse shooting in a Scottish petition.
3. Inability to contact supporters: the current system puts parliament in control of all communications through the petitions system. I can understand that. The advantage of the system is that it is run by the Westminster parliament (not the government) and not by some commercial firm or NGO; in return the petitioner gets quite a lot (the 10,000 signature trigger and the 100,000 signature trigger) but compared with other petition sites, or indeed crowdfunder sites, the petitioner has no means of thanking supporters, asking them for more help or giving them updates, and those are real disadvantages if you are the campaigner. My solution?: the petitoner should be allowed to email all signatories of their petition (without having access to their identities) after a government response is published at 10,000 signatures, at 50,000 signatures, and at 100,000 signatures, and those emails should be published on the petition site. This would allow people to be thanked for their support and to be supported if they wished to do more on the subject in question.
4. Government gets off Scot-free: the system allows government to write evasive and incorrect responses to petitions – parliament should not be happy with that. I’m not complaining that government doesn’t do anything in response to a petition that gets the requisite 100,000 signatures, after all, it’s hardly a referendum of the population, but a response should actually respond honestly to the petition. I’d be more impressed by a government response that said ‘We don’t care, we’re doing this anyway’ than the ones we get at the moment (particularly from DEFRA it seems to me) that appear to be written without regard to the question posed or the truth of the matter. My solution?: giving the petitioner the right of reply to a government response (see above) would sharpen things up quite a lot. For a crap response to be taken apart on the parliament website by an individual citizen would be a very powerful way of speaking truth to power. There would have to be rules of politeness and length but it is entirely feasible and would be entirely proper.
5. What the Committee does: the Petitions Committee appear from the outside to be running a bureaucratic process (which really doesn’t need much MP input) rather than running an interface between the electorate and parliament and government (see here for their role). As it is at present, the whole process could be regarded as a sham that government can shrug off very easily – government can lie in its responses to petitions and suffer no comeback. The Petitions Committee does not, as far as I can see, make any assessment of whether the system is working or not, which government departments are most often targetted, and the quality of government responses – it could do all those things. A Secretary of State who had to answer questions along the lines of ‘Why are so many petitions directed at your department? Why are your responses so poor compared with those from other departments? Since your department didn’t answer this question XXXXX? would you like to answer it now?’ would be put on the spot.

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