Today we received a home made petition. Someone had taken the words from our sign up page printed them at the top of a page of A4 and added two columns for name and postcode and circulated it around their friends. They got 40 signatures. And we're sorry to say that they're all wasted.

Why? Because we need more than name and postcode for it to be acceptable to South Cambridgeshire District Council. As an absolute minimum for a paper petition we must have their address too. In addition to the addresses some people have signed their name but not printed it and we can't read the signatures.

But for us it's worse than that. We're now circulating our own paper petition. It's a paper form, one per household with a paper version of our questionnaire on the back. For example it's going out in the next edition of Milton Village View and it's being circulated in other villages too. Using a paper form has great value to us, especially if people fill in the questionnaire too.

So how do we know that people who sign up using our petition form haven't already signed up on this home made petition? We don't. Not unless we carefully sit down and compare every form we received with this list and try to decipher the hand writing each time.

That plus the missing information leaves us with little choice but to discard these home made petitions. So whoever organised this one (and we don't know as there was no name and address on the petition) has effectively disenfranchised anyone who now decides not to fill in our form because they think they're already signed "our" petition.

They haven't.

We do appreciate the effort people have gone to in producing and circulating these petitions. However, please in future could everyone stick to the "official" petition. The campaign to save the park will be much more effective if all our efforts are co-ordinated.

Written: 19/01/07

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