Total number of actions received between May 1st 2010 and May 1st 2011: 19,240 (although in the response the Department said approx. 18,000)
Number of letters: 5,025
Number of petition signatures: 1,200
Number of emails: 13,015
Biggest campaign: Greenpeace – Stop fuels from oil sands being used in the EU – 5,650 emails
The Department of Transport was keen to stress in its reply that ‘no complete record is kept centrally of all the campaign correspondence received by the Department for Transport’ going on to state that ‘furthermore, it may well be that, where multiple copies of the same letter/e-mail were received from multiple recipients, not every copy will have been retained‘.
Concluding that ‘from adding up the figures for each of the individual campaigns (please be advised that this is not necessarily an exhaustive list), it is possible to calculate that at least 18,000 items of campaign correspondence were received in total during the year in question. However, the actual total is likely to have been higher’ which it is because my calculations show they listed over 19,000 actions.
Breakdown by topic and organisation:
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View the spreadsheet in google docs here. Information taken from Freedom of Information request returned on 27 May 2011 and is adapted from a list of information provided by Department of Transport.
More about the ‘Campaigns Total’ project here. Be first to get the information from other departments by subscribing to the site using the box on the right, adding http://thoughtfulcampaigner.org/ to your RSS feed or following me on twitter (@mrtombaker)
If they don’t keep a ‘central’ track of petitions and issue-based correspondence even within a department, I wonder how (or perhaps whether?) they assess what counts as a large or small response to an issue?