Updated petitions viewer

In 2018 we created our petitions viewer which shows the geographic breakdown of UK Government Petitions on a hex layout. The Petitions site was put on pause when the General Election was called and only just restarted last week.

A new Parliament brought new constituencies. Thankfully, as regular readers of our blog will know, we already had a new hex layout ready to go. But we still wanted the tool to be able to display all the previous petitions. That has meant re-engineering the page so that it works out which Parliament a petition is from and then uses different layouts and different reference data (populations, electorate, EU Referendum results etc) as appropriate.

We've also taken the opportunity to update the hex layout to include boundaries of nations and regions. These should add a little bit more context to the map. To help people find constituencies more easily, we've also added a search tool to the top of the map.

The only thing that we haven't yet been able to include for the 2024 Parliament is the signature disparity score. For each constituency, this is the percentage-point difference between the share of signatures for the petition being visualised and the percentage share of signatures over many petitions. Unfortunately there haven't yet been enough petitions, or signatures, for that to say anything sensible. It is something we can revisit next year.

We hope you find it useful. If you do, please let us know and share it with others.