This petition closes on January 19th 2024, having achieved more than 10,400 signatures. This number of signatures prompted an official response from the UK Government on January 24th 2024, stating: “The new Suicide Prevention Strategy includes action across Government that we believe will address much of this petition. We will continuously monitor delivery and embed new actions when needed.” You can read the Government’s response by following this link.

The remainder of this post is as it was published when we launched the petition in July 2023.

Need to know more before you sign? Here’s a summary of the why, what and how behind this petition – watch this short video:

Since January 2023, Steve Phillip, Paul Vittles at The Jordan Legacy have been carrying out an action research project focused on asking those who work in suicide prevention and those whose lives have been impacted by suicide ‘what practical actions will significantly reduce the number of suicides?’.

We summarised all these practical actions in the form of a desired state map of what a ‘Zero Suicide Society’ looks like – a society that is willing and able to do all it can to prevent all preventable suicides and the 1st Edition of our Report was published on 11 July, which would have been Jordan’s 38th birthday.

We felt that this first edition of the report was ‘good enough’ to publish, to start getting feedback on our action research & analysis around the practical steps to get the numbers of suicides on a downward trend ‘towards zero’; we know from our work in mental health and suicide prevention that ‘perfectionism’ is a common problem – accepting ‘good enough’ is often the healthy route!

We’ve taken all this feedback + all the great ideas & suggestions, and now incorporated them into this 2nd Edition Report.

To view and download a copy of this 2nd report click here.

The Exec Summary includes a full exposition & explanation of our ‘Zero Suicide Society Transformation Model & Framework’, including:

“Building Blocks” that will enable us to effect transformational change – with the suicide numbers stuck at 6,000+ preventable deaths each year for the past 15yrs, suicide prevention is one of the great transformational challenges of our time; and…

..the “Jigsaw Picture Puzzle” illustrating the complexity & multi-faceted nature of suicide & suicide prevention and how we need to have all the ‘pieces in the puzzle’ to see the big picture & solve this puzzle; and not fall into ‘The Priority Trap’ just focusing on some pieces, ignoring others – a key reason why the suicide numbers remain at an unacceptably & needlessly high level when most suicides are preventable.

Both reports emphasise that we can all take action – individuals, families, communities, organisations, workplaces, industries, etc – and we all must take the practical actions we can, but clearly we need some actions from government, some changes to legislation, some changes to regulation, and a national framework which best supports suicide prevention, intervention, crisis support, and appropriate, effective support for those impacted by suicide and other trauma experiences.

We have taken all those key practical actions identified in our research (and our broader conversations and panel discussion events over the past three years) that require action from government – and specifically changes in legislation or regulation – and then consolidated these into a proposed ‘Suicide Prevention Act‘ to seek to minimise suicides’.

The petition

The format of the online ‘Petition to Parliament’ process restricts how much text we can fit into the space allowed so we have had to be selective and edit our long list – and there is a longer list of proposals we can share in our communications with you as well as further explaining the thinking behind each of those that made the shortlist.

However, the Petition that is now live contains the absolutely crucial requirements within a Suicide Prevention Act that we know will enable us to get those suicide numbers down.

If you want to know more before signing the petition or urging others to sign the petition, please don’t hesitate to ask, and we’ll endeavour to answer your queries. Contact us here.

If we can get 100,000 signatures for this petition, we can prompt an evidence hearing and debate in parliament that would provide the opportunity to discuss and debate all the benefits and any concerns about the detail of what we are proposing.

Remember – even if you have some queries or concerns about how this might work in practice, we would still ask you to sign the petition to at least enable the opportunity for an open debate.

Also you can come along to one of The Jordan Legacy’s online events to discuss the report and petition. This link will take you to our event where we’ll be presenting the report and petition and inviting further discussion

So now – ACTION!

Thank you, in anticipation, for helping us get the 100,000 signatures we need.