Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, Chairman. How are you?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No. Since I'm talking to a fellow select committee, and fellow select committee chairman and members, I thought we would dispense with the formal part of it, and just crack on and see if I can answer your questions.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  You'll get answers, you just may not like them.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  To some extent it is. I might revert to my clerk on occasions, just to make sure that I'm giving you the correct information. In the report we've produced, which basically takes the government's e-petition system and brings it into Parliament to a joint system so it will be shar

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, the plan is that it will be a select committee. The way we run the majority of our select committees in this country is that the chairman is elected from across the House. The chairman of the committee will be elected by Labour and Conservative MPs, and in fact the franchise

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes. Let's bring my clerk in, Mr. Yardley, who is probably more up to date on the immediate statistics.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No, they were all 100,000 plus. The new system we're coming up with, with a specialist petitions committee, will inject more flexibility into the process.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Look, I'll be perfectly honest with you. I have never been an enormous fan of e-petitioning. I think there is a danger that it could dumb down political engagement, but one must set aside one's own opinions as chairman of a committee. This is a serious bit of work we've done. To

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The concern I have about a joint petitioning system is that it doesn't make the distinction between the executive and the legislature. Now, more power to your elbow—and that's an English turn of phrase that I'm not sure will translate—so good for you in Canada for taking a differ

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The threshold now is the lead signature plus five, so we've gone to six. We reckon that by having six, that will reduce the petition load from, on average now, about 15,000 to around 7,500. About 7,500, give or take, of the petitions currently get less than six signatures. As fa

Procedure and House Affairs committee  To be fair, there was a diversity of views, and the minority on our committee, but a significant minority, felt that by not having a lead member of Parliament, it undermined the involvement of Parliament and members of Parliament. So it was a finely balanced judgement.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's a very good question. All communications, as you well know, are open to abuse. I don't know if you have postcard lobbying campaigns in Canada, but we get them here and you get people signing postcards and you send them a letter and they write back saying, “Mr. Walker, I ha

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We won't be requiring a postal code from people signing it. I believe the petitioner will be contacted and have his details checked. Sorry, we're having our own little conference here. I'm going to let Huw answer that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Again, that would be kept in confidence. We had long discussions about this. What we have recommended is that if I were to sign a petition.... Let's say one of my constituents was to sign a petition. They will be given the option of alerting their local member of Parliament tha

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