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!