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Safe Water Stevenage

Asking Stevenage Borough Council for a child-focused safety assessment of publicly accessible water in Stevenage, and proportionate improvements where a professional assessment identifies unacceptable risk.

0 verified supporters
  • 0 Verified supporters so far
  • 1,000 Council debate threshold
  • 1,250 Our campaign target

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Our goal

Stevenage has ponds, lakes, balancing and drainage ponds, brooks and other watercourses that children can reach. Most are ordinary, valued parts of the town, and many will already be entirely appropriate exactly as they are.

What Stevenage does not currently have is a single, published, child-focused picture of which publicly accessible bodies of water have been assessed for risk to children, when that assessment was carried out, and what was decided as a result.

This petition asks for that picture to be created, published, and acted on where professional assessment identifies unacceptable risk.

It is a request for assessment, prevention and transparency. It does not assert that any particular location is dangerous, and it does not ask for any particular safety measure to be installed anywhere. Those are judgements for qualified people with the site in front of them.

What we're asking for

We ask Stevenage Borough Council to:

1. Identify the publicly accessible ponds, lakes, balancing and drainage ponds, and other significant bodies of water that fall within its responsibility.

2. Carry out a child-focused risk assessment of each, using recognised professional standards for water safety.

3. Publish the outcome in a form residents can actually read, including the date each assessment was carried out.

4. Implement proportionate safety improvements wherever an assessment identifies unacceptable risk. The measure should be whichever one qualified assessors judge appropriate for that location — which may be improved signage, planting, bank re-profiling, rescue equipment, depth markers, barriers, or no change at all.

5. Set a review interval, so that the published picture stays current rather than becoming a one-off exercise.

Our plan

  1. Hear from the community
  2. Collect verified support
  3. Map the water locations residents tell us about
  4. Submit the petition to Stevenage Borough Council
  5. Publish their response in full
  6. Track what actually happens afterwards

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How we use your information

We collect your name, address, postcode, email address and signature to operate and verify this petition. Your email address is used to confirm your support and is not added to any marketing list. If this petition is submitted to Stevenage Borough Council, the submission includes your full name, your address and postcode, your signature, the date you confirmed your support, and which version of the wording you supported. Your email address is not included in the submission. Your address, email address and signature are never shown publicly -- public pages show counts only.

What we collect

Your full name, full postal address, postcode, email address and the electronic signature you draw. We also record when you submitted, when you verified, and which exact version of the petition wording you supported.

Why we collect it

To operate the petition and to verify that each supporter is a real, distinct person. Petitions to public bodies normally require a name and address for each supporter, and verification is what stops a petition being inflated.

Your email address

Used only to send you the link that confirms your support, and a limited number of reminders if you have not used it. These are transactional messages needed to complete your support. Signing a petition never subscribes you to HertsPartners marketing, and there is no box here that does so.

Who it is given to, and exactly what is given

If this petition is submitted to Stevenage Borough Council, the submission pack contains one row for every verified supporter: full name, address and postcode, the signature that was given, the date support was confirmed, and the version number of the wording supported. Your email address is not included in the submission. Nothing else held about you is included -- not your IP address, not when you first opened the page, not any other record HertsPartners holds. We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising.

What "verified supporter" means

"Verified supporter" means exactly two things: the supporter gave the information this petition requires, and they confirmed access to the email address they gave by using a single-use link sent to it. It does not mean their identity has been independently checked. It does not mean any council has approved or validated the record -- no authority sees a supporter record at the point of collection.

What is public

Only counts. The number of verified supporters is public. Your name, address, email address and signature are not shown on any public page, and are not included in anything we publish about the petition.

How long we keep it

These periods are HertsPartners' own retention policy. They are not set by, or required by, any council. Support you confirmed: kept for 24 months after the authority responds or the submission otherwise reaches its outcome, and then anonymised, with the signature file deleted. Support that was never confirmed: deleted after 90 days, because it was never part of the petition. Records marked as duplicates or otherwise excluded from the count: kept for the same period as the record they belong to, together with the reason they were excluded, so that the final number stays explainable. After those periods only aggregate counts remain -- totals, which are not about any identifiable person.

Contacting us about your information

You can contact HertsPartners through the contact page about anything held about you, including asking us to remove your support from a petition that has not yet been submitted.

Your support is counted only after you confirm it by email.