At the end of June, I introduced a petition which is still growing very slowly each day but thankfully it does grow each day. I thought it would be interesting to compare it against the petitions that are much more significant. To be clear the petition which I am working on which is listed below currently has 2,460 signatures. The average number of signatures is 24 a day since it was started and so far the best day has been 63 signatures and the least effective day involved 3 signatures. There are a number of petitions that don’t get any higher than a dozen signatures. There is one that is five months old and it only has 7 signatures. Now to be fair it has the call for “Move the Stage 4 opening a week earlier from 21 June” and although it began on the 17th May, clearly after the 14th June 2021 it was not likely to receive any support. The four largest petitions based on the current numbers are shown above and the drawing of how quick they have received a significant number of signatures comes from the petition grapher website. That website does not focus on petitions until they have reached 20,000 to 30,000 so they don’t illustrate the petitions that get far fewer signatures. If we focus on the fourth biggest petitions:

The “Introduce Sanctions against Israel” was set out on 14th May and that was the day when the signatures reached about 30,000 signatures and on the following day it achieved around about 154,000 signatures and it reached 374,000 signatures at the end of the first week. It has since increased by another 14,000 signatures.

The next one is “Give the UK a Bank Holiday on Monday July 12th if England win Euro 2020” and it was launched on 6th July 2021 and it achieved its 27,971 within 2 days by the 8th July 2021. Within its first week it had reach 364,502 and since then it has extended to another 234 signatures

The third one is “Ban Animal Testing – Fund, accept & promote alternatives to animal testing” which was set out on 12th April and it was not on the diagram until three months later on July 11th when its signatures reached 30,787. The increase continued for a week when it had reached 226,525 and it has now reached another 9,227.

The fourth one is “Introduce an Independent Regulator for Football in England by December 2021” which was published on the 13th May and within 3-4 days it achieved about 35,000 signatures and by the end of the first week it had achieved 140,924 signatures and then since then it has achieved another 1,976 in the last 145 days so an average of 14 signatures a day which is less than the average that my petition has achieved in a shorter period.

It is not clear what it takes to break through these approaches, I can only hope that within the next few weeks we might see something similar. Here is the words of the petition.

Provide additional funding for redistributing surplus food

In April the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee called on the Government to provide ongoing funding to redistribute surplus food from the farmgate and across the supply chain to food aid providers. In June the Government said there were no plans for further grants. This should change.

A Minister at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affair told the Committee “that the Government takes food waste very seriously” and that she expects “this to be an area in which we continue to work as Government”. We need the Government to provide public funding to enable the many agencies to carry out the work necessary to prevent food waste and improve food security. Sign this petition