Resident Pulse tracks what UK residents are petitioning about — across the UK Parliament, Scottish Parliament and Senedd petition systems — for all 382 UK local authorities, links campaigns to published council meeting minutes and planning consultations, and turns it into weekly intelligence for councils, planners and researchers.
It was built on a simple observation: petitions are how residents organise now, but nobody was listening to them systematically. A petition is a deliberate act — someone cared enough about a bus route, a pool, or a housing scheme to put their name to it. Counted carefully, that is a measure of local feeling that has never existed before.
Resident Pulse was founded by Dr Juemin Xu, an experimental psychologist at UCL, whose research covers how people make decisions and how collective preferences reveal themselves in data.
We measure publicly visible resident sentiment. We provide the same measurement to councils and applicants, and we do not run, assist or advise campaigns on any side. Reports never include personal data about petition signers or planning commenters — counts, topics and trends only.