Rejected petition Bring democracy to the UK - Government must debate the e-petitions

More details

Bring democracy to the UK - Government must debate the successful e-petitions.

The UK's e-petitions initiative, intended to get the public's issues debated in the Commons, has fallen at the first hurdle, with two petitions on ice due to lack of time.

The e-petitions website lets the public start a campaign and invite people to sign to support it. Once signatures go over 100,000 – as has been the case for a petition for cutting benefits for rioters as well as one seeking the release of documents on the Hillsborough disaster – the issue is supposed to be debated by the House.

Unfortunately, the group that is supposed to get a chance to discuss the issue, the Backbench Business Committee of MPs, is complaining that it hasn't been given it any extra time to deal with e-petitions.

We need to the government to actively debate all e-petitions that reach the threshold.

To not debate them, is to bring into doubt the democracy that we supposedly have in the UK.

This petition was rejected

Why was this petition rejected?

There’s already a petition about this issue. We cannot accept a new petition when we already have one about a very similar issue.

You are more likely to get action on this issue if you sign and share a single petition.

We only reject petitions that don’t meet the petition standards.

Date submitted 9 September 2011
Get petition data (json format)

About petition data

The data shows the number of people who have signed the petition by country as well as in the constituency of each Member of Parliament. This data is available for all petitions on the site. It is not a list of people who have signed the petition. The only name that is shared on the site is that of the petition creator.