Petition Statistics

A selection of statistics from our petition database. Statistics are updated approximately hourly.

A little bit of explanation about the "number of days" values...

Petitions go through a two stage process before being published (or not, as the case may be). When you submit a new petition, you are initially given a link to it that only you know about. It's then your job to get a certain minimum number of people to sign the petition using that link. This is what's called the "moderation threshold" in the data. At the moment, that's five people.

When a petition reaches that threshold, it will then be checked by the petitions moderation team to ensure that it meets the standards for publication. If it does, it will then be published. If not, it will be rejected.

What that means is that petitions don't usually get published or rejected on the same day they are submitted. It takes some time to get the necessary five supporters, and then once that number is reached the petition goes into a queue to be checked. You can see how long that all typically takes in the statistics.

We've presented the time it takes for petitions to be checked by the moderators as three different values: an average (mean), a median and a typical (mode) number of days. That's because some petitions take longer to check than others; for example there may be legal reasons why a petition cannot be published (eg, if it is potentially libellous) so this may require a professional legal opinion to be sought. But the ones with a very long wait tend to distort the averages, so the typical (modal) values are usually a better illustration of how long a petition author will normally have to wait before their petition is published.

The two-stage process also explains why even rejected petitions have signatures. Because the moderation threshold has to be reached before the petition is checked, every petition, no matter whether accepted or rejected, will always have at least six signatures (the author and five creators) before it gets to the moderation team. And some will have more, because there's no limit on how many people can suport a petition before it gets checked.

New petitions in the past seven days	85
Closed petitions	65,730
Open petitions	402
Rejected petitions	107,548
Total signatures on closed petitions	138,754,139
Total signatures on open petitions	4,331,321
Total signatures on rejected petitions[see notes]	983,263
Average number of days for closed petitions to reach the moderation threshold	2
Average number of days for rejected petitions to reach the moderation threshold	1
Average number of days for closed petitions to be checked	12
Average number of days for open petitions to be checked	22
Median number of days for closed petitions to be checked	6
Median number of days for open petitions to be checked	23
Median number of days for rejected petitions to be checked	6
Median number of days for closed petitions to be checked in the current parliament	14
Median number of days for open petitions to be checked in the current parliament	23
Median number of days for rejected petitions to be checked in the current parliament	76
Typical number of days for closed petitions to be checked	6
Typical number of days for rejected petitions to be checked	5
Typical number of days for open petitions to be checked	21
Typical number of days for open petitions to be checked in the current parliament	21
Typical number of days for rejected petitions to be checked in the current parliament	15
Typical number of days for closed petitions to be checked in the current parliament	7
Deleted petitions	96
Total signatures on deleted petitions	271,204
Average number of days for deleted petitions to reach the moderation threshold	2
Average number of days for deleted petitions to be checked	20
Median number of days for deleted petitions to be checked	7
Median number of days for deleted petitions to be checked in the current parliament	7
Typical number of days for deleted petitions to be checked	6
Typical number of days for deleted petitions to be checked in the current parliament	6
Average number of days for open petitions to reach the moderation threshold	1

Petition date graphs will work better if you rotate your fondleslab into landscape mode.

Accepted petitions by publication month

This chart shows the number of accepted petitions published in each month since the current petition system was launched. Note that the very first month of the current system had an abnormally large number of petitions; this was due to the publicity given to the new Parliamentary petition system at the time - every Tom, Dick and Harriet fancied their chances with a petition! The blank months are those immediately following the dissolution of Parliament and a General Election when the system is temporarily closed.

Click/tap on a bar to go to the petitions which opened in that month

You can use the sliders to narrow down the range of dates. Note that if you zoom in too closely it will show individual days rather than months on the x-axis. This is an artifact of the javascript library that we're using; the data is always only grouped by month.

Submitted petitions by submission month

This chart shows the number of petitions submitted in each month since the current petition system was launched, irrespective of whether (or, indeed, when) they were accepted or rejected. As before, the chart is front-loaded at the start of the system, but there are also some interesting spikes at other times. You might want to guess what prompted a surge of petitions in June 2016 and March 2020.

Click/tap on a bar to go to the petitions which were submitted in that month

Rejected petitions by rejection month

This chart shows the number of petitions rejected in each month. Unfortunately, due to a change in the way that the petition data was presented in the API, this data only goes back to the start of the 2015-2017 Parliament. As with created petitions, there are some notable spikes in the data at times of particular national interest.

Click/tap on a bar to go to the petitions which were rejected in that month

If this graph makes it look as if lots of petitions are being censored, bear in mind that the most common reason for rejecting a petition is that it's a duplicate of one that has already been published. At times of particular public interest it's to be expected that a lot of people will want to create a petition along essentially the same lines. Rather than spread signatures around lots of similar petitions, people who create a duplicate are encouraged to support an existing one instead.