Good afternoon to you.
Perhaps I might start just by clarifying that the system that my chair has just outlined to you is the system that is proposed by the committee in the report that was published last week. It's not the system that actually happens at the moment.
At the moment the House of Commons itself has no e-petition system. The government runs an e-petition system, and when an e-petition reaches 100,000 signatures, it will send a letter to the backbench business committee inviting it to consider allocating time for a debate.
So there's no automaticity there. It's at the discretion of the backbench business committee, and the threshold is set by the government. It's the government's decision when an e-petition reaches 100,000 signatures that it will then ask the backbench business committee to allocate time for a debate.