Rejected petition: Require petitions to show both support and opposition before debate
Rejected on
Reform the UK petitions system so petitions include both “support” and “oppose” voting. Parliamentary debate qualification should consider overall public opinion, not only signatures in favour, to better reflect the true balance of public sentiment on controversial issues.
The current petitions system only measures support, which can give a misleading impression of public opinion where small but highly organised campaigns gain significant attention. Allowing both support and opposition voting would provide a fairer and more accurate reflection of public sentiment before parliamentary time and resources are allocated to debates.
Why was this petition rejected?
It’s not clear what the petition is asking the UK Government or Parliament to do.
We're not sure what you mean by "Parliamentary debate qualification should consider overall public opinion". For example, we're not exactly sure whether you would want to see a certain number of 'opposing' votes to mean that a petition shouldn't be debated.
At the moment, the Petitions Committee considers whether to debate petitions that receive over 100,000 signatures. The petitioning system was designed to allow individuals to raise issues which they feel are important, rather than to allow people to vote for or against the proposals of a petition. People can usually start petitions representing the opposite view on the issues raised by a petition. When this happens, and both gain a substantial number of signatures, these can be debated together.
We only reject petitions that don’t meet the petition standards.