Alan Turing
Last week, the a 10 Downing St petition resulted in Alan Turing receiving the apology and recognition that he has long deserved. And petitions are likely to become a much more prominent fixture of public life in the next year or so.
My sources in Westminster tell me that the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill (pdf) (text version) is likely to get royal assent at some point in the autumn and will come into force in May 2010 with guidance potentially in place as early as February 2010.
That’s not as far away as you think, and looking through the bill, the team here at LD (Anthony and I, at any rate) think that there are quite a few issues that councils need to deal with as a matter of some urgency.
In some cases, this will involve a tweak to the existing procedures that allow for the consideration of e-petitions. In others, it may almost be a start from scratch. Either way, I’ve been trying to look at the bill and turn it into a decision flow-chart, but there are still quite a few questions that will need to be answered before spring 2010.
I’m aware of projects being already live (so far) at Bristol, Birmingham, Kingston, Lambeth, Northants, Southwark, Wolverhampton, and I’m sure that I’ve missed a few more (do let me know in the comments!).
There are a number of commercial suppliers that have built technical tools that can be integrated into a council website in one way or another. These include….
As far as I know (and I need to have a detailed look before I can confirm this) they all allow the council to put a tool on the website that would allow a local resident to attempt to initiate a petition. This attempt to initiate would, however, then be subject to a pre-moderation before it goes live on the council website (i.e. an officer would be notified that a petition had been set up and would have to verify that it met the council’s criteria before it was published on the council website).
This pre-moderation would have to be done, in each case, subject to an agreed formula, and an agreed procedure will decide whether they go live or receive a polite ‘we regret to inform you…’ note a short time afterwards.
So, for example, when your local council leader is petitioned, as Tony Blair was, to ’stand on his head and juggle ice-cream’, this is very likely to fall outside the scope of the act, and can therefore be politely ignored. But less obviously contentious cases will need more consideration.
Again, councils appear to have a certain amount of discretion as to what that formula is (though one that is too restrictive may backfire). In addition, that discretion will be tempered by the appropriate national body (I’m guessing that this means DCLG) which can determine what direct issues the local authority does / doesn’t deal with.
I have experience of deploying software that is intended to promote democracy – in my case, it was the obligation in 2005 that was placed upon every local authority to provide councillors with edit-able webpages. In many cases, this was not a welcome imposition (at least as far as some council officers were concerned) and a exceptionally minimal interpretation was placed upon it by councils with a very poor result.
I would be worried that councils would be able to look at the bill – as it stands – and simply understand from it that the public can email them and request that they set up a petition on the website – one that could just be delivered using a simple web-form. Unless the appropriate national body’s guidance is very carefully written, there is likely to be a problem with the usability, the prominence, the interoperability of the system that many local authorities may chose to adopt.
Remember, un-usable, hard-to-find and un-interoperable (is that a word?) systems are cheaper in the short-term. Choosing such a solution can be presented as saving the ratepayer money! (WordPress has a petitions plug-in! I installed this one in about five minutes!). It will also result in a lower take-up of petitions (Boo!/Yay! – delete as applicable). Certainly, data-standards will be needed to ensure that box-ticking isn’t done by local authorities in this respect.
However, let us – for now – assume that councils embrace this idea enthusiastically and establish a system that is well-promoted, usable and very efficient to deploy. Then we have another problem entirely.
Establishing a petitions process at each local authority is going to involve a great deal more than simply installing the system and then awaiting the results.
As I mentioned, the draft bill shovels off a lot of the key decisions to an ‘appropriate national authority’ which will make the key pragmatic decisions around what subjects exactly fall within the scope of the bill and which subject areas councils can largely wash their hands off. The bill is specific about broad issues – that the subject should be relevant to the work of the local authority, or to “the improvement in the economic, social or environmental well-being of the authority’s area to which any of its partner authorities could contribute.” (14.2.b.ii)
That last bit – italicised is likely be mean that most councils will have to change their existing democratic procedures on two fronts. Firstly, it is possible that the way it is interpreted could result in all sorts of environmental issues (for example, anti-nuclear petitions) to start flooding in. These are likely to be popular and beyond the council’s competence – it could result in national or even European issues being the subject of concerted local campaigns that councillors will find themselves embroiled in.
For me, the key issues are likely to be around the volume of petitions, and the consequences of there being more of them. How will councils handle a large number of petitions? If there are going to be a large number of them, are councils going to have to change their procedures to accommodate this?
Increasingly, councils have a lot of their business being dealt with by less formal sub-committees with fewer, brisker council meetings at which decisions are rubber-stamped.
How will these meetings cope with dozens of new petitions, all of which require a fixed amount of time to address them? While councils aren’t obliged to bring each petition to council meetings, councils may have concerns about not doing so.
If this will be the case from May onwards, perhaps your council needs to start revising its processes now? I would say that my personal view on this is that the volume won’t really reach the point where it will cause these kinds of problems, but it’s hard to know for certain.
I have a few other questions:
How are the authenticity of the signatures checked? The CLG say that the obligation should be the same as with paper petitions. But as the petitions are electronic, and therefore, processable, is there a heightened expectation that councils should run some kind of query? Or will a greater volume of petitions that have the same ‘authentication’ problems as paper-petitions create more work for local authorities?
My personal view on this is that it won’t be an issue, but I’ve been in enough presentations of similar ideas to local authorities to know that it is a fear that will probably expressed a great deal between now and May (and will be totally forgotten afterwards).
And what about this question of calling an officer to account? Again, I’m not exactly clear, currently, how far a member of the public can put a petition together in order to draw a full-time council official across the coals (and it will vary from council to council), but a statutory duty to do it, to make it easier, and to promote that option to the public will surely result in speculation that more members of staff will be subjected to a show-trial of some sort.
Again, I raise these questions because I’m sure they will be raised elsewhere. I’d suggest that the best attitude to this all is to recognise that this will provide a great opportunity to look at how civic conversations can be improved. Certainly, more active petitioners will challenge local authorities to find ways of ensuring that those hard-to-reach people who don’t sign petitions / participate in consultations etc, don’t get drowned out by the hard-to-avoids.
Any comments on all of the above gratefully received!
[...] Petitions and e-petitions: A few observations… [...]
I’ve just been having a Google for e-petitions, to inform the discussion at our own council about what to do. (Hence my late arrival at this blog post.)
You can add Staffordshire, Leicestershire and Brighton & Hove to your list of ‘live’ councils; they all use the same system (from ModernGov, I think) and I have to say I wasn’t impressed by its usability.
Also worth a look are the efforts from the Scottish Parliament (not pretty but functional) and National Assembly Wales (slightly prettier, equally functional).
Of the councils you list, I was totally unable to find even a whiff of e-petitions on the Northants, Southwark and Wolverhampton sites.
Bristol is interesting. It’s hugely popular: there are 10 petitions active at the moment, and one last year got over 10,000 signatories. Yet that’s in spite of the fact that the council seems to take months to consider the petitions and then fails to provide any adequate response to most of them. (Perhaps the petitioners got personal email responses, but if so, that ought at least to be stated in the “closed petitions” section of the site.)
E-petitions were introduced in Brighton & Hove at the end of November. I was one of the first to initiate a petition, objecting to the proposed closure of the Brighton History Centre (BHC). It has so far attracted 1,240 ‘signatures’ and, along with e-mails to councillors and letters to the local press, has had the desired effect. The council leader announced that the BHC will be kept open for the foreseeable future, nearly three weeks before the petition is due to close.
Perhaps the fact that the ruling Conservatives no longer have a majority was a factor, although the strength of opposition, which was actively encouraged among the other parties, must have come as a shock. Even I was surprised.
Authentication and eligibility were issues after the launch of the petition but the rules and practice seem to have been settled.
David,
With all due respect to you and your campaign, let me play ‘Devil’s Advocate’ here: Saving a ‘History Centre’ may have happened at the expense of another project that it would be less easy to convene support for.
There is, surely, a social class issue here? Also, again playing ‘Devil’s Advocate’, you seem to be saying that you issued a threat to a party with a small majority. There is an implication there that they may have acted against their better judgement?
Sure, you have got your way, and I’ve no way of knowing whether that is in the wider public interest or not. But surely if politicians aren’t making decisions based on judgment and are instead increasingly reacting to electoral threats, we’re all in trouble?
You seem to be saying (and let me repeat my ‘Devil’s Advocate’ line to ensure I don’t offend here) that a very small minority of the population bullied the council into doing its bidding.
Or can I put it even more strongly – in the spirit of provocation: That an even smaller majority who felt disproportionately strongly about an issue, and had well connected individuals in their numbers (people with either the money, charm or fame needed to convene larger numbers) came up with an effective way of getting a larger number of people who mildly share their views to respond to a call-to-action?
Personally, I think this is all very worrying.
I’m sorry to say that I don’t think your devil’s advocacy holds up. Yes, a small minority ‘got its own way’ over this issue. Although the small minority, from a broad cross-section of the community–no question of a class issue here–are active users of a facility provided by the city council, the council had the authority and power to dismiss the petition on that basis.
However, the e-petition has attracted more ‘signatures’ than the number of votes cast for 16 of the city councillors at the 2007 elections–ie, almost a third of the councillors who make all manner of decisions on our behalf have less support. The largest share of the electorate by which councillors were elected was 32 per cent, the smallest 10 per cent. This raises far more important questions about democracy and the number of people who are entitled to have their voices heard.
As for the idea that it was well-connected individuals using their money, charm or fame, the only one of those that any of us might claim is charm. What matters in such circumstances is some ability in organisation and advocacy but most of all sincerity and tenacity. Such campaigns have to be mounted in the face of political party machines, powerful council officers, ill-informed and arrogant councillors and public apathy.
No, this was not bullying by a clique. If anything, it was resistance to bullying by the council (far be it from me to suggest it was one councillor in particular). A bad judgment was proposed by council officers and accepted too uncritically by the cabinet (other councillors have very little say these days).
The clincher that demolishes your devil’s advocacy, however, is the fact that no one has lost out. The small amount of money needed was found because the council had got its sums wrong and underestimated council tax revenue by £1.1m–19 times more than was needed to keep the history centre open for the next five years.
It is incompetience and bad judgments by councils that are worrying. That an e-petition by honourable citizens can make a difference is inspiring.
“the small minority, from a broad cross-section of the community–no question of a class issue here–are active users of a facility provided by the city council”
Really? You’re sure about that? Just on experiences of the people who would campaign to keep something like that open, I find that difficult to believe.
You say “the council had the authority and power to dismiss the petition on that basis” but you also said (earlier) “Perhaps the fact that the ruling Conservatives no longer have a majority was a factor…” – it doesn’t sound like they DID have the power – the implication of your first comment would seem to be that the fact that they were a weak administration was a factor in persuading them.
In comparing signatures from all over Brighton with the number of people who voted for individual councillors in individual wards is not comparing like with like. One thing is for certain: very many more people voted for the people who made the initial collective decision to close the project down than signed the petition. Even if you’re arguing that the legitimacy of a decision rests on the number of people who agree with it (and I *really* wouldn’t argue that either!) surely the only fair way of looking at it is that a small organised bunch of people with stronger preferences trumped a larger number of unorganised people with mild preferences.
I’d nominate this paragraph…
“No, this was not bullying by a clique. If anything, it was resistance to bullying by the council (far be it from me to suggest it was one councillor in particular). A bad judgment was proposed by council officers and accepted too uncritically by the cabinet (other councillors have very little say these days).”
… for some kind of award for the most blatant of subjective judgements.
And I’m not sure that you’ve ‘demolished’ my argument either. All councils have to make forecasts and make decisions on them. To call that incompetence is very unfair. Financial forecasts like this are never that accurate. You’re accusing people here of ‘bullying’ ‘incompetence; and ‘bad judgement’ – elected governments will always enforce the decisions that are made by their elected executives, forecast things inaccurately and make judgements that you disagree with.
And if you think they are that bad, you can get rid of them on a regular basis. Or if you think that their quality of judgement or deliberation isn’t up to much, you could stand for election yourself?
One way of guaranteeing that judgement gets worse is to promote the idea that populist demands can trump proper deliberation, and that is broadly what happens in practice when petitions become a factor in public life..
There’s a new ePetitioning system called Democracy which was designed specifically for councils in response to this new bill. It’s centrally hosted and councils can seemlessly embed it into their website with just 1 line of code and they can administrate the whole thing via a control panel, create graphs and such like. Here’s a link to the software company’s site:
http://interact-technologies.com – there’s a PDF link to download a brochure.
Sorry if it sounds like a plug but I just wanted to add it to your list of petitioning software.