Procedure and House Affairs committee  I have to be honest with you. I don't think we've ever found anything to give us cause enough to investigate further. So I have to say I'm not quite sure what we would do if we did find something wrong with the system. I guess it would be a matter for the technical staff to repor

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The official answer is yes, there are some who have signed a large number of petitions and certain individuals do like signing e-petitions. I think the sort of success in terms of the system might be though that since the system started, it's roughly about 3.5 million individuals

Procedure and House Affairs committee  One of the reasons we store the email addresses is to stop people signing the same petition more than once. That's one of the things the system does automatically. We don't stop an individual signing a number of petitions. There are no restrictions there. As to the IP addresses,

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No, I think, particularly given the desire to see the site more jointly hosted by government and Parliament, we've used this election as a suitable point at which to stop the old site and launch the new site with some changes. I think the electoral cycle process would inevitably

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We require a signer of a petition to declare that they are a U.K. resident or a British citizen. They can be living abroad. They also need to have an active email account. We require those who live in the U.K. to provide a valid postal code, which is checked against a Royal Mail

Procedure and House Affairs committee  My understanding is that all postal codes are checked automatically against the database. That's my understanding.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  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 a

Procedure and House Affairs committee  With verification there are several steps that we take for people signing petitions. When they send an email, they get an email confirmation, so we can check that the email account is valid. It takes some action on their part. We also ask them to enter a couple of randomly genera

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Currently there's a choice of three, six, or twelve months, which the petitioner chooses. We thought it was important at the start to give petitioners that choice. But I think it's one of the things, through experience, we've discovered is probably more problematic than it is hel

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I could give you some actual figures. Less than 25 is going to be a very large proportion. I don't know if I have that exactly at hand. We know that about 30% of approved petitions have two supporters or fewer, and about 58% have five or more supporters. So I can't give you the

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think the figure was given earlier. About 150 have reached the 10,000 mark at which the government provides a policy response—so it's about 150.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes. We have about 15,000 petitions submitted each year. About 50% of those, about 7,500 petitions a year, so 30% of those 7,500 would have two or fewer supporters.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I don't think that's been a particular feature. There are other organizations out there that are known for their petitioning and their lobbying through that route. There are some examples. The biggest petition we had was about cancer screening for young women, which received 325,

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There have been several changes to the system already. There have been some relatively minor ones in terms of the wording of the website. There have been some procedural ones. At the start of the process, the government did not respond to e-petitions and about 18 months into the

Procedure and House Affairs committee  At the moment, it's relatively straightforward. A quick Google search would take you to the home page. There are prompts on the home page that encourage people to search for that subject. You'll appreciate that quite a few petitions are rejected because they're duplicates of exis