Yes, in the U.K., essentially what happened was that a member of staff in the Office of the Leader of the House of Commons was left at the beginning to determine what constitutes a duplicate. There was no process around it whatsoever so it was very much sort of “try it and see how it works”. They were, quite obviously, struck at the beginning by the sheer volume of petitions that came in. It was very difficult in the early days to figure out an effective way of dealing with duplicates.
They still haven't in a sense resolved the problem. I'll give you the example that's been relevant here. There were concerns about a death penalty e-petition. They were sure that 100,000 signatures would be generated for an e-petition supporting the reintroduction of the death penalty. What in fact happened was you ended up with dozens of different types of e-petitions on the death penalty, none of which ever reached 100,000, and therefore, considered for debate.
Westminster, in a sense, because it only has the threshold of 100,000 to be considered for a debate, simply ignores the problem. This is why we've argued that a petitions committee, which could look at a number of petitions in a particular area of policy, could decide over a period of time to look at a number of petitions that have achieved different levels of signature, to decide what should be done with them, and to have a debate on the death penalty and all the various aspects of it that the public had raised in their petitions. At the moment, in Westminster, they simply don't get anywhere. They're simply ignored, and therefore, there is a concern that it's a very thin form of public engagement, which is why we would recommend to you that you have some kind of committee system to deal with that.