e-Petitions at Downing Street
Downing Street launched an e-petitions system in November 2006 in partnership with the non-partisan charitable project mySociety. The idea is to provide a service to allow citizens, charities and campaign groups to set up petitions, enabling anyone to address and deliver a petition directly to the Prime Minister.Those petitions are hosted on the Downing Street website.
The innovative service allows anyone who is a UK citizen to create a petition and to collect signatures via the website. Petitioners are asked to meet basic criteria, set out in an acceptance policy. Only around 1 in 6 submitted petitions have had to be rejected, and the principal reasons for doing so had to do with obscenity, potential to cause offence, libel or duplication.
Given that the system has received over 1,000 petitions during the first week after the launch, before anyone starts creating a petition, the system asks to use a box to search to see if someone else is already petitioning on the same topic.
Since launch, the site has been very busy. The facts and figures of the site up to mid-February show: over 3,381 petitions are active and available for signing; there have also been over 2,555,972 signatures and 2,110,710 signers.
