The Petitions Committee was established in 2015 to improve public engagement with politics and allow people to petition parliament electronically for the first time.
Any British citizen or UK resident can call for the government or parliament to take action, by creating an online or paper petition. Over 100 million signatures have been added to petitions since the committee was established. Over 66,000 petitions have been accepted while 70,000 have been rejected. Petitions must clearly ask the government to act on something that the government is directly responsible for. They cannot request that somebody be awarded or lose an honour or a job. Petitions are unsuitable if they are extreme, offensive, libellous, a joke or a duplicate of another open petition. They can also be rejected by the committee if the issue is being dealt with in parliament in a different way.
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