The prospect of a Parliamentary e-petitions system has been considered a number of times over two Parliaments, but up until now has not been brought to fruition. Two Procedure Committee reports, in 2007 and 2008, called for the establishment of a House of Commons system, but discussions ran into the sand and their proposed system was never implemented. Meanwhile throughout the 2005-2010 Parliament, the Government ran an e-petition system of its own on the No. 10 e-petition website.
In May 2011, the Government system was revived, this time run by the office of the Leader of the House. The first steps were taken towards collaboration between the Government and the House on e-petitions when the Leader of the House announced that he would send any petition signed by at least 100,000 signatures to the Backbench Business Committee for them to consider finding time to debate it.
This was perhaps not the first step towards collaboration that the House hoped for. Neither the House nor the Backbench Business Committee were consulted in the decision and it resulted in both some uneasiness about the effect on the House and concern about the failure of the collaboration to engage the public in how Parliament works. This dissatisfaction eventually led to a motion brought to the House by the Government in May 2014 which called for a truly collaborative e-petition system; one in which a member of the public could petition the House of Commons and press for action from Government.
The Procedure Committee was commissioned to develop detailed proposals on how this collaborative system would take shape. It reported last week. The report sets out how the system will work, including the ways in which Members will be involved, how petitions will be moderated, the signature threshold for the publication of an e-petition and procedures for petitions to be debated in the House [1].
The key recommendation of the report is the creation of a House of Commons Petitions Committee which would oversee the e-petitioning system on behalf of the House (liaising with the Government) and would also oversee the House’s paper petitioning system. This recommendation comes forty years after the Petitions Committee set up in the early nineteenth century was dissolved. The new Petitions Committee will be much more effective than its predecessor, which could do little more than sort and classify the petitions received by the House. It will be able to consider petitions (submitted either electronically or by paper) and will have a number of options open to it about how to respond. At the Committee’s discretion, it may correspond with petitioners on their petition, call petitioners for oral evidence, refer a petition to the relevant select committee, seek further information from the Government on the subject of a petition or put forward petitions for debate. The Petitions Committee itself will decide which petitions merit further action, and what action is appropriate in any particular case. The number of signatures on a petition will be a significant influence on whether and what action the Committee decides to take, but the Committee will exercise its own judgement on the importance of an issue. That means that the Committee will not be in thrall to well-funded lobby groups or newspapers which may attempt to force an issue to its attention, but will be able to pick up less high-profile but perhaps equally important issues raised by less well-supported petitions.
The implementation of the e-petition system does not signal the demise of the paper petition. The Procedure Committee recommends that the Government should continue to respond to every paper petition presented to the House, and the Petitions Committee itself will be able to take further action on paper petitions just as it will on those presented electronically. The Petitions Committee will be encouraged to recommend any necessary changes to the paper petitioning system which may arise as a result of the implementation of the new e-petition system.
A key feature of the Procedure Committee’s report is the recognition of the case for better engagement with petitioners. The Committee’s recommendations aim to ‘meet the needs of both the executive and the legislature—but more importantly, also of petitioners themselves’ [2]. Petitioning the House has been central since the earliest days of Parliament and the recommendations that this report sets out seek to offer an accessible update to this ancient procedure, opening up another channel by which the public can engage with Parliament and enhancing the value of petitioning the House.
Notes
[1] Procedure Committee, Third Report of 2014–15, E-petitions: a collaborative system, HC 235 [PDF]
[2] E-petitions: a collaborative system, HC 235, para 81.
Charles Walker is the Member of Parliament for Broxbourne and Chair of the House of Commons Procedure Committee.
Further reading
What Next for E-Petitions? [PDF] – Hansard Society (2012)