Evolving the public petitions service for Scottish Parliament

The Challenge

The Scottish Parliament wanted to create an accessible service to make it easier for citizens to submit a petition to Parliament .

As Unboxed had designed, developed and still maintains successful petitions platforms for the Welsh Senedd, the UK Parliament and the States of Jersey, we were in a great position to meet the needs of the Scottish Parliament. We’d already built a flexible service with features that could be turned on and off depending on the protocols and legislative processes of each Parliament. This meant we could deliver a working service quickly in Scotland.

Our approach

The Scottish platform had many similar features to the service we created for the Senedd in Wales. We’d already ‘future proofed’ this service, anticipating the needs of other nations by making it easy to toggle features on and off. We were able to reuse much of the code and work with the Scottish Parliament to adapt functionality for their needs.

For example, we could turn off the functionality that flags when a petition gains a certain level of supporters, as that is not relevant for Scotland. As in Wales, we enabled the platform to be ‘always open’ - unlike for the UK Parliament, where petitions can only be submitted when Parliament is in session.

Like the Senedd, the Scottish Parliament was going through a rebranding process at the time of our work, updating their corporate identity and style guide. That meant we needed to make sure we could adapt quickly as the new branding was developed. Unboxed has extensive experience of working with government design systems, such as the GOV.UK design system, meaning that we could draw on our knowledge of accessible patterns and components for public-facing services.

We were able to map historical records from the old to the new system so that users can search for any petition, whether it is under consideration, closed or archived.

The outcome

People in Scotland can now create and publish a petition in a few minutes at https://petitions.parliament.scot/. Unboxed continue to work with parliaments across the UK to develop and improve citizens’ engagement in democracy.