Written evidence from Change.org (CWM0011)

Executive Summary

  1. Change.org is the world’s largest petition platform - growing by more than two million new users a month, and empowering millions of people to start, join, and win campaigns for social change in their community, city and country.
     
  2. In the UK we have over 9 million users who win around 50 campaigns a month on the site. MPs from all political parties have used Change.org to start or endorse campaigns, and there are thousands of Change.org users in every constituency in the country (and in many constituencies, tens of thousands of users).
     
  3. Our users’ campaigns vary from the hyperlocal (for example 200 people saving a local pub or school from closure) to the international (over 1 million people signing a petition to save Meriam Ibrahim, a woman in South Sudan who was threatened with execution.)
     
  4. Some of our users’ most high profile campaign victories include keeping women on British banknotes, putting FGM on the Department for Education’s agenda, bringing Ghoncheh Ghavami home from an Iranian jail and saving the families of the New Era Estate in London from being made homeless.
     
  5. Campaigns which begin on Change.org regularly make their way onto the agenda of both the government and Parliament. Since this consultation opened, over 300,000 signatures asking for the UK to lift refugee quotas helped spark a debate in the House and this September we have seen Caroline Nokes MP announce an APPG inquiry into the health of models following a petition on Change.org. And since we launched in the UK in 2011, scores of Change.org petitions have been referred to in debates, EDMs and oral and written questions.
     
  6. We welcome the e-petitions platform built by the government and Parliament, but believe we can work together to make those tools much more powerful for the general public.We recommend:
     
    1. The Petitions Committee and Change.org should explore ways to allow signatures on Change.org to count towards totals used on the Parliamentary platform. There are a range of ways to make this happen, including (but by no means limited to) integrating the current Parliamentary petitions system with Change.org’s API, as the White House’s world-leading “We The People” petitions system has done in the United States.
       
    2. The principle that signatures and petitions on Change.org could count towards the totals set by the petitions committee as benchmarks for both a government response and a goverment debate is one we want the petitions committee to recgonise. It would bring immediate benefits for Parliament by bringing in millions of people who use Change.org (the UK and the world’s largest petition platform) into the democratic process and we are keen to explore this possibility with the committee as soon as possible.
       
    3. It is also our view that although well-intentioned, the current system’s focus on achieving numbers as a benchmark for debate is too blunt an instrument. Put simply, numbers of signatures - though important - are not the only measure of a campaign’s validity or importance. Furthermore, a focus on large numbers may discourage people from starting campaigns in the belief that they may not be able to attain 10,000 or 100,000 signatures, or suggest that getting numbers is the only way to really engage on an issue.
       
    4. Furthermore (and in the near term) we would request that Parliament provides clarity on how Change.org users can best engage with the Backbench Business Committee to ensure their petitions recieve Parliamentary attention when appropriate

Our response to your questions

When will the Committee consider each petition?

  1. In line with some of the MPs and other experts consulted during the process which helped set the structure for the Parliamentary petition system, we believe that the focus on two arbitrary numbers - 10,000 signatures for a government response to a petition, and 100,000 for a debate in Parliament are unhelpful.
     
  2. Firstly, these numbers suggest that the quality or importance of a campaign issue can be quantified easily by the number of signatures. There are times when this may be the case, but there are also cases where issues of national importance might not attract the signatures required for a response - much less a debate in Parliament.
     
  3. We are also concerned that these figures will have an unintended chilling effect on campaigns, with some petition starters believing they will not be able to reach the 10k or 100k figures and therefore not taking action on an issue that matters to them. There is also a risk that some campaigners view the numbers as the ultimate goal and prioritise getting to them ahead of more meaningful campaigning.
     
  4. Although we recognise that these numbers might initially seem like useful way of assessing the merits of campaigns - and certainly make the administration of the Parliament petition system easier, as many petitions will not reach either milestone - we would ask the committee to explore a range of other measures to ensure that important campaigns on which don’t attract 10,000 or 100,000 signatures are not ignored.
     

How will the Committee decide which petitions will be debated?
 

  1. The Committee states that the total number of signatures will be a major factor in deciding what will be debated by the House (with provisos around topicality, interest from MPs and whether or not the issue is already being scrutinised by government or Parliament).
     
  2. As we outline above, we believe that the focus on 100,000 signatures is an unhelpful one - we do not believe that the merits of a campaign or their potential national or legislative significance can be assessed by focussing on an arbitrary number.
     
  3. We welcome the indication that petitions with fewer than 100,000 signatures may be debated if there is “widespread support from MPs across the House” - but would ask for clarification on the measures used to ascertain “widespread support”.
     
  4. The above caveats aside, we welcome the direction of travel on this issue which we hope will see more petitions debated in Parliament than in the past.

How will the Committee facilitate public engagement in debates?
 

  1. We welcome the Committee’s commitment to engaging the public in the run up to debates. This is an important element in demonstrating Parliament’s openness and responsiveness. However, we believe that Parliament could better engage the public by agreeing that signatures on external sites like Change.org - with its 9 million UK users - can count towards the totals required to spark debates and governent responses.
     
  2. At a stroke, this will bring millions more citizens into the UK’s democratic process in a more formalised way - allowing users to choose the platform which best suits their needs while still achieving Parliament’s stated aim of bringing citizens into the democratic and Parliamentary processes.
     
  3. Another benefit of some form of integration with Change.org is that Parliamentarians would also be able to use Change.org’s Decision Maker tool to engage directly with the public ahead of the debates. Tools like this allow MPs to contact interested citizens directly and quickly, and demonstrate to citizens in real time that their voices are being heard.
     
  4. More broadly, more detail on how the committee plans to facilitate engagement with MPs would be appreciated.
     

Will the Committee consider petitions hosted on other e-petitions sites?
 

  1. As we have touched upon in other points of this response, we believe that the biggest single barrier to mass engagement with the Parliamentary petition system is the decision to exclude the petition starters and signatories of other platforms from counting towards the totals required to spark a debate or government response.
     
  2. By doing so, the Parliament petition platform site creates an unecessary barrier to entry for campaigners on sites like Change.org - the largest petition platform in the UK. This barrier has recently been overcome by the White House’s “We The People” platform which recognises that to achieve its goals of bringing as many voices into the democratic process as possible, integration with established, trusted, politically neutral platforms like Change.org was a logical next step. More information on this decision can be found here.
     
  3. Countless Change.org users have used the act of starting or signing a petition as a first step to becoming more politically engaged - whether on high profile petitions such as No More Page Three or the Save New Era Estate campaign - or on the thousands of campaigns running on the site on local or regional issues. Our users even include scores of MPs who sign, start of share petitions - and they recognise the Change.org platform can help makes politics and campaigining accessible to their constituents.
     
  4. As we have stated above, we believe that not allowing signatures from Change.org petitions to count towards the totals for debates and responses from government is a counter productive decision by the committee and we hope to be able to meet with its chair, members and clerks to discuss this issue in the near future.

September 2015