Petitions and e-petitions

Charles Walker Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That–

(1) this House approves the recommendations contained in the Third Report of the Procedure Committee, E-petitions: a collaborative system (HC 235), concerning the establishment of an e-petition system jointly owned by the House and the Government, and of a Petitions Committee with responsibility for overseeing both the e-petition and the existing paper petitioning system;

(2) the following new standing order accordingly be made, with effect from the start of the next Parliament—

“Petitions Committee

(1) There shall be a select committee, called the Petitions Committee, to consider public petitions presented to the House and e-petitions submitted through the House of Commons and Government e-petitions site.

(2) The committee shall consist of not more than eleven members.

(3) The committee shall have power to send for persons, papers and records, to adjourn from place to place, and to report from time to time.

(4) The committee shall have power to appoint a sub-committee, which shall have power to send for persons, papers and records, to adjourn from place to place, and to report to the committee from time to time.

(5) The committee shall have power to report from time to time the evidence taken before the sub-committee.

(6) The quorum of the sub-committee shall be three.

(7) The committee shall be responsible for determining whether a sitting should take place in Westminster Hall under paragraph (1)(a) of Standing Order No. 10 (Sittings in Westminster Hall) to consider one or more petitions or e-petitions, and shall report any such determination to the House.”; and

(3) the following amendments to standing orders be made, with effect from the start of the next Parliament—

Standing Order No. 10 (Sittings in Westminster Hall)

In paragraph (1)(a), leave out “Backbench Business Committee” and insert “Petitions Committee”.

In paragraph (1)(a), leave out “e-petition or e-petitions” and insert “one or more petitions or e-petitions”.

Standing Order No. 14 (Arrangement of public business)

Leave out paragraph (5).

Standing Order No. 122B (Election of select committee chairs)

Add the following new sub-paragraph to paragraph (1):

“() the Petitions Committee.”

Standing Order No. 152J (Backbench Business Committee)

In paragraph (8)(b), leave out “paragraphs (4) and (5) of Standing Order No. 10” and insert “paragraph (7) of Standing Order No. 10”.

Of the Procedure Committee’s three debates this afternoon, this is the big enchilada: the one that the House—or at least those in the Chamber—has been waiting for with bated breath.

On 8 May, the House agreed to establish a collaborative e-petitions system. In the intervening time, the Procedure Committee has worked hard to come up with a workable and robust set of proposals. In brief, we are proposing the following system. A petition will need to attract the support of six people before going live, and it will remain live for six months. Oversight of the joint e-petition system will be undertaken by a House of Commons Petitions Committee, which will have an elected Chair and elected Members. The Committee will be able to correspond with petitioners on their petition, and to call them for oral evidence. It will be able to refer a petition to the relevant Select Committee, and to seek further information, either written or oral, from the Government. May I say that oral evidence will be requested only in exceptional circumstances? The Committee will obviously be allowed to put forward petitions for debate. It will be supported by excellent House of Commons staff.

May I remind hon. Members, who may be drawing breath at the thought of the creation of another Committee, that the House had a Petitions Committee from the early 19th century up until 1974? It is not the Procedure Committee’s intention to create an additional Committee, but for the new Petitions Committee to replace an existing Committee. However, that is for the business managers to decide.

In his evidence to us, the then Leader of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley), said:

“I think it is important to have a committee in some form to highlight to the public that Parliament treats this seriously, to make sure that Government departments respond properly and fully, and to be able to recommend debates where necessary.”

The Petitions Committee will decide which petitions merit further action. It will take the existing threshold of 100,000 signatures as the established starting point for considering whether there should be a debate in the House. However—this “however” is very important—in this age of mass campaigning, the Committee will also be mindful of smaller petitions that although not benefiting from the support of well-funded and organised pressure groups are nevertheless deemed to be of great importance to a community and it will perhaps be mindful, in extreme cases, even of a petition from an individual.

The Petitions Committee will seek to improve engagement with petitioners. Often, those submitting and supporting a petition will not get the exact outcome they want, but they will hopefully feel that their concerns have been appreciated and heard through constructive engagement with the Committee, and through receiving responses from the Government and—on occasion—the relevant Select Committee. Moderation of the site will be carried out by e-petition staff.

It is also our intention for the e-petition system to contain a facility that allows our constituents to alert us when they have signed a petition—after all, we all greatly enjoy and love hearing from our constituents. That facility would be provided through the provision of an e-mail address, and a strong suggestion that when our constituents provide us with an e-mail address they also provide us with their home address so that we can verify that they are our constituents.

The threshold of six signatures has been identified because it requires the lead petitioner to seek support for his or her position, but ensures that in seeking that support the demands on the individual are not too onerous. Within the current system, around one in five e-petitions that have been submitted have attracted fewer than three signatures, and 42% have attracted fewer than six. This is a petition system; it should not be for individual representations as those are best made to the relevant Member of Parliament. To emphasise the parliamentary oversight of the system, and in line with the House’s historic role as the principal recipient of public petitions, we have recommended that the site’s URL be e-petitions.parliament.uk, with a clear link from the Parliament website to the e-petition site.

On the important matter of privilege, a petition should not be privileged simply by virtue of having been approved by staff of the Petitions Committee. The House publishes much material on its website that is not a proceeding in Parliament and is therefore not privileged. The point at which an e-petition becomes a proceeding in Parliament will be when it is considered by the Petitions Committee. Only when the Committee has considered the petition and considered it fit for presentation to the House will it constitute a proceeding in Parliament. Notwithstanding the issue of privilege, it is possible that a petition published on an e-petition site, and endorsed and established by the House, could attract the more limited protection of the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840. Therefore, the Petitions Committee staff drawn from the House will need to exercise their usual great care in the moderation of petitions, to ensure that no potentially actionable material is published in an e-petition without the explicit authority of the Petitions Committee.

A petition will be open for signature for six months. After that, the title of each e-petition will be recorded in a list in the Votes and Proceedings of the House, together with the number of signatures it has attracted. Should a Member wish to pursue it, the paper petition system will enable the formal presentation of the subject of an e-petition on the Floor of the House.

In bringing forward debates we recommend that the Petitions Committee assume responsibility from the Backbench Business Committee for determining debates on e-petitions in Westminster Hall. Importantly, the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), is supportive of that change. If the Petitions Committee decided that a petition warranted debate in the main Chamber, it could approach the Backbench Business Committee and ask for that time to be provided. However, the Backbench Business Committee is under no obligation to grant that time—there will be no land grab.

For paper petitions, we have concluded that the rules and procedures should remain as they are, with one exception, which is to provide the Petitions Committee with the power to consider paper petitions and take appropriate action, alongside petitions coming through the electronic system. I believe that change will strengthen the paper petition process.

Let me return to the vexed issue of cost. The cost of the new system we are proposing is set out at the back of our report, but we estimate the one-off start-up cost at £188,000, with an annual running cost of around £115,000. Those costs will be shared between the House and the Government. There could also be an additional cost of £39,000 to enable data from the site to be made available through data.parliament.uk. That cost will be borne by the House, if approved by the Finance and Services Committee.

In addition to the cost of setting up and maintaining an electronic petition system, we estimate that the staffing cost will be about £200,000 per year, equating to a team of four full-time equivalent people—Officers of the House. The cost of those House staff will be borne entirely by the House. Finally, the running cost of the Petitions Committee, depending on its practices, is expected to be around £50,000 per annum. If anybody is doing a running total, I believe that those numbers add up to about £395,000—if they do not, any hon. Lady or Gentleman who discovers that my maths is wrong can approach me later. For further details of costs, I refer colleagues to the recently published memorandum from the accounting officer that is available in the Vote Office.

To conclude my rather lengthy remarks, I thank my excellent Committee Clerks. They are heroic in every way—patient, intelligent, insightful and rather brilliant, and I thank them for the huge amount of effort that they have put into this report. I also thank the Government digital service and the former Leader of the House, who is sitting next to me, for his efforts in bringing this Committee to life. A joint Petitions Committee overseen by a Committee of the House is one of the most amazing things that has happened in this place for some time, and he is to be congratulated on his foresight in allowing it to become possible. I also thank the current Leader of the House for the support he has given our Committee in bringing forward these proposals.