ePetitioning: A viewpoint from Bristol City Council
By Carol Hayward, Acting Corporate Consultation Manager at Bristol City Council
Despite being new at UK government level, ePetitions are nothing new to the Scottish Parliament and a number of local areas including Bristol and Kingston-upon-Thames. In Bristol we launched our ePetitioning system in 2004, and since then nearly 60 ePetitions have been signed by around 20,000 people, and helped to influence many council decisions.
Indeed, quite often the petitions are launched by local councillors who almost use them as single issue surgeries, and the level of response they receive is then fed directly into the council chamber.
In my role we are constantly encouraging people to use online ways to communicate with the council to improve and broaden engagement as a whole and reducing barriers to this are always high on our agenda.
The recent Number 10 petition on 'pay-as-you-go' road charging teaches us a lot about such barriers. It's clear from the 1.7 million signatures that such barriers are easily broken down provided the incentive is strong enough.
It's true that road charging touches almost everyone, but so have other issues posted on the Number 10 petition site - from ID cards to university tuition fees to the NHS - which have not attracted anywhere near the level of signatures or interest. So why was the road charging petition different?
I have no clear answer, but I think a number of key things have helped the road-charging petition become popular.
The petition had a direct link into a relevant industry body; with a strong membership of willing petitioners (Peter Roberts, who launched the petition is a member of the Association of British Drivers - a very vocal body who opposes many transport issues). Viral marketing was also used to great effect, with a post about the petition appearing in almost every appropriate eForum on the web (see CAD Tutor, RAC, VNU and the Paintball Association's Forum too see just a few) and word spreading to inboxes across the country via email forwards.
The national press became interested in the petition when the signatures hovered around 200,000 and early on questions about how the result of the petition would be handled by confused and annoyed ministers were bandied around. The scent of rebellion attached itself to the petition and it matured and became stronger with every news report.
If annoyance at the proposed new tax alone didn't break down the barriers to engagement, the not-to-be-missed and never before available opportunity to easily join a fight against what many felt was a high-handed solution was encouragement enough for thousands. But almost as strong as that was perhaps a hope that this new form of participation, with limited procedures and processes to get involved, has the potential to influence Whitehall. Something we will wait for with baited breath to discover as the proposed bill moves through parliament.
How this public pressure is acted on and responded to is vitally important to the success or failure of the ePetitions site.The level of interest in this single issue must help to inform parliament's discussions but a knee-jerk reaction to keep the public happy should also be avoided. When the final decisions are made about this issue, communication with those who signed the petition must make clear what effect their representation made to that process.
I very much hope that it is left as a tool that has the potential to act as the voice of the people, and I really believe that the public's belief they have the power to influence decisions, as well as national democracy as a whole, will be the better for it.
Locally, the publicity surrounding this national issue has encouraged local campaigners to follow their lead and we currently have the highest level of interest in our epetitions site than we have ever had before. Lessons can be learnt about the success of the road charging petition with respect to publicity which can be passed on to local campaigners.
ePetitions in Bristol has become a well-used and well-known tool for local democracy and we now need to reinforce the message through case studies that demonstrate how a local person has created a petition and how, in doing so local decisions have been altered, arrested or changed.