Data note #1 · Resident Pulse · July 2026
Every week, thousands of people in Britain sign petitions — to Parliament, to the Scottish Parliament and the Senedd, and on platforms like Change.org and 38 Degrees. Each signature is a small, deliberate act: someone cared enough about a bus route, a swimming pool or a housing scheme to put their name to it.
We collected all of it. For every one of the UK's 382 local authorities, we gathered the open petitions relating to that area — 16,155 unique petitions across five sources — located each one in the right council area, and classified every petition by topic. In the week we took this snapshot, local Change.org petitions alone added over 56,000 new signatures.
Here is what Britain's residents are asking for.
One topic dominates: transport and roads — buses, parking, potholes, crossings, low-traffic neighbourhoods — accounts for 19% of all local petitions, more than any other topic. It is the single most common petition subject in 185 of the UK's councils — roughly half the country. Whatever national politics is arguing about this week, the surest way to move a British resident to signature is to change how they get around.
The runner-up is not housing or the NHS. It is leisure and culture — 13% of local petitions — and reading them is sobering: overwhelmingly they are campaigns to save something. Save the swimming pool, the library, the community centre, the theatre, the market. This is the visible surface of a decade of squeezed council budgets: when discretionary services shrink, petitions bloom. Environment and green space (12%) tells a similar story — much of it residents defending specific parks, trees and playing fields from specific plans.
Only about 4% of the petitions in our data are purely national causes. The rest name a place: a street, a school, an estate, a stretch of coastline. Two of the biggest petitions in the dataset make the point — "Don't let the Duke of Westminster demolish our homes!" (215,000 signatures) and the campaign over a named school in Bury (375,000). People use petition platforms the way they once used the letters page of the local paper — except now the letter carries six figures of co-signatures, and no editor decides whether it runs.
Adjusted for population, petition activity varies enormously. On official Parliament petition data — where signature counts come from signers' own constituencies — residents of the most active council areas (Amber Valley, North Kesteven, West Devon and others) sign at over 110 signatures per 1,000 residents, several times the rate of the quietest areas. Petition intensity is a measurable, comparable property of a place — a temperature reading for local feeling that, as far as we know, nobody has taken before.
For seven councils, we ran a pilot: we read the minutes of their recent committee meetings (56 meetings) and checked them against their residents' petitions. The result: 29 cases where a petition's subject was substantively discussed — a petition for a health centre presented at a Newcastle City Council meeting; Kent's cabinet reporting on the bus-pass scheme residents had petitioned about; Hackney's cabinet approving the precise development a resident campaign opposed. The link between what residents ask and what councils decide can be traced, meeting by meeting. We think it should be — everywhere.
Resident Pulse tracks petitions across the UK Parliament, Scottish Parliament, Senedd, Change.org and 38 Degrees for all 382 UK local authorities, updated daily, with AI-assisted topic classification and links to council meeting minutes. We publish a data note each month; a weekly per-council briefing is available for councils, and researchers can ask us about the data. Contact: hello@residentpulse.co.uk · Map and per-council pages: https://residentpulse.co.uk.
Methods, briefly. Snapshot late July 2026. Sources: petition.parliament.uk (open petitions ≥500 signatures; local counts from official per-constituency data, apportioned by population where a constituency spans councils); petitions.parliament.scot and petitions.senedd.wales (same method via constituency boundaries); Change.org and 38 Degrees (petitions located by their coordinates within council boundaries, or kept only where the petition text names the council; non-UK petitions removed; counts as reported by the platforms). Topics assigned by an AI classifier (14 categories) over petition titles; percentages are of all 16,155 tagged petitions. Platform petition locations are the petition's, not each signer's. Data available on request.