That's correct. We have already started alerting people to the fact that we will take the site down when Parliament is dissolved on March 30, which happens automatically now under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.
The obvious administrative problem would be that if you had a new administration coming in and there was a live e-petition site that had e-petitions with a government response, it wouldn't necessarily reflect current government policy. So it was felt that having a cut-off point that was linked to the electoral cycle made administrative sense in terms of operating the system.