UK Petitions

What is this?

This tool allows you to view UK petitions data by locality.

Anyone who is a British citizen or a UK resident can start a petition on the official government website, petition.parliament.uk.

If the petition gets a minimum of 10,000 signatures, the government usually responds. If it gets 100,000 signatures, it may be debated in Parliament.

Why did we make this?

Petitions are one way of getting a sense of what people in the country care about. Even though the government does expose all the petitions data on the page, it does it on a per-petition basis. It is difficult to know what petitions are popular in a particular area, or how petitions are related to each other. This tool tries to help with that.

What is salience?

The goal of the salience metric is to show whether a petition is more or less popular in a given constituency than is to be expected.

This should help make it clear whether an issue in a constituency is as popular as it is nationally, more popular than it is nationally, or less popular than it is nationally.

To do that, we use the following formula:

Salience = Sc / St Pc / Pt
Where:
Sc = Signatures for the petition in a constituency
St = Total signatures for that petition across all constituencies
Pc = Population of that constituency
Pt = Total population of all constituencies

If this value is >1, then the petition is more salient in the constituency than it is nationally. If it is <1, the petition is less salient than it is nationally.

Sources & licences

The petitions data

The petitions data is all made available in JSON format on petition.parliament.uk

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The topics assigned to petitions

We use the list of most important issues on pages 15-26 of the British Election Study 2014-2024 Combined Waves 1-29 Internet Panel Cookbook.

Fieldhouse, E., J. Green, G. Evans, J. Mellon, C. Prosser, J. Bailey, R. de Geus, H. Schmitt, C. van der Eijk, J. Griffiths, & S. Perrett. (2024) British Election Study Internet Panel Waves 1-29. DOI: 10.5255/UKDA-SN-8202-2

The constituency boundaries

The constiuency boundaries are the Westminster Parliamentary Constuencies (July 2024) Boundaries UK BUC.

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024.

The map

The map data itself comes from OpenStreetMap.

The constituency populations data

The populations are calculated using data from the House of Commons library.

Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.