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Procedure and House Affairs committee Not at all.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee I think we should.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee Thank you.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee You are very generous. Thank you.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee The debates take place in our secondary chamber, which is called Westminster Hall. I'm sure your clerks can get videos of it off the parliamentary website to give you an indication and flavour of how it works. The debates are for up to three hours. They don't have to last for three hours, but they're for up to three hours.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee Ministers reply. In a debate on the main floor of the House you will get ministerial statements from the front benches. You have the government and the opposition at the start, and then with these three-hour debates around petitions, the front benches wind up at the end, normally with about 10 to 15 minutes for each side.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee I'll let Huw answer that.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee Absolutely. If a petition went on and secured under 50,000 signatures in a week, I envisage the petitions committee getting involved at a very early stage.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee That's exactly why we want the petitions committee to be able to bring forward petitions for debate that fall well short of 100,000 signatures. Let's give an example. We are a much more populated country than you, obviously, and a tiny geographical region, but we still have parts of the country that not a lot of people live in.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee Members of Parliament are very good at bringing forward issues relevant to their constituencies. We have adjournment debates for half an hour in the evening after the end of business. I brought things forward from my own constituency around, for example, mental health. I think this is another tool.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee Here are some: holiday companies charging extra during school holidays; effects of welfare reform on sick and disabled people; stopping female genital mutilation in the U.K.; cervical cancer screening tests and the case of Sophie Jones; making Eid and Diwali public holidays; research funding and awareness of pancreatic cancer; ending the conflict in Palestine.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee That is an extraordinarily interesting question and that suggests I haven't got a very good answer to it. You're probably well ahead of us on this. The case of paper petitions...for example, I did a paper petition a few years ago and got 16,000 signatures. We put that in the bag behind the Speaker's chair and that paper petition is kept indefinitely in some vault for hundreds and hundreds of years.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee That actually puts the electronic petition system out of step with the paper petition system, which I think is something we might have to have a look at.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker
Procedure and House Affairs committee That's a very interesting question. What our IT people and those who are involved with the current petition system have told us is that you know within 48 hours whether the petition is going to fly or not, whether it's going to get anywhere near the 100,000. So I think any petition that's dropped off after six months has in essence probably failed to attract the requited number of signatures to pique the interest of the petitions committee.
December 9th, 2014Committee meeting
Charles Walker