[PenguinRevolver]

If you live in the UK, then please go to the UK Government and Parliament website and sign your name on this petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/634725

It's currently at 6,327 signatures; it needs 3,673 more for the government to respond and 90,000 more after that for a debate to be considered.

[IshKebab]

Writing to your MP (don't use a template) would be more effective. I have yet to see a single one of those petitions that resulted in anything more than a brush off. Even much more popular ones.

Letters to MPs almost always result in a brush-off too but they do take notice of them at least. Very occasionally you do get a non-template response too.

[frereubu]

I've written to my MP twice in my life (as you say, non-templated because otherwise it's as meaningless as sending them a photocopy) and got a detailed response twice. If you take the time, they generally do too. (Obvious caveat that this is a sample size of one person and two emails / letters...)

[IshKebab]

I've written to an MP maybe 10 times in total and I would say 80% responded with a template. But they do at least have to have an assistant read the letters and pick the right template response.

The one I remember where they didn't do that was when I wrote to them saying that Ordnance Survey's maps should be free, and that did actually improve! They're not totally free not but they are much freer.

And the worst response I've had was the most recent when I wrote about the UK's insane criminalisation of term time holidays, and they wrote back assuring me that they were doing everything they could to deal with COVID??

Even so, still much more effective than petitions.

[jaredlt]

For others reading, I just used https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ to write to my MP.

[bdavbdav]

This is interesting- 6k signatures (and just the one (no duplicate) petition when searching seems very low. I suspect there isn’t a huge amount of knowledge in the Facebook-mass-share spheres that usually kick these petitions into the big numbers.