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\53. A petition should not be privileged simply by virtue of having been approved by Petitions Committee staff. An analogy may be drawn with the role of the Clerk of Public Petitions in respect of the existing paper petition system. She may approve the wording of a proposed petition to the House, which is then prepared and circulated by the petitioner to collect signatures before being presented to the House. There is no implication that the petition is privileged whilst it is being circulated for signatures to be collected.
\54. Neither should the fact that the House is publishing the petition, and providing the means by which signatures may be collected, mean that an e-petition would be privileged at this stage. The House publishes much material on its website (and indeed elsewhere) which is not a proceeding in Parliament and which is not therefore privileged.
\55. The point at which an e-petition became a proceeding in Parliament would be the point at which it is considered by the Petitions Committee itself. The Petitions Committee should be given the explicit task, in its Standing Order, of considering whether an epetition is fit for presentation to the House. Presentation to the House would not take place until later in the process, at the end of the six-month signature period on the e-petition site.53 Once the Petitions Committee had considered the petition and determined that it considered it fit for presentation to the House, it should constitute a proceeding in Parliament.
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\61. When an e-petition reaches the end of its time open for signature on the site, we consider that it would be appropriate for it to be presented to the House, and entered on the formal record of its proceedings. For this to occur it will not be necessary for an epetition to be presented on the floor of the House in the same way as a public petition brought through the paper petitioning system; nor for the full text of the petition to be republished, since arrangements will be made for an archive to be kept of the electronic version of all published e-petitions. Instead, we recommend that, once it is closed for signature, the title of each e-petition be recorded in a list in the Votes and Proceedings (or elsewhere in the formal record of House proceedings), together with the number of signatures it has attracted.
\62. Should a Member wish to pursue it, the paper petition system will enable the formal presentation of the subject of an e-petition on the floor of the House. Although, as we note above, an e-petition may not meet the rules for paper petitions, in practice—as our predecessor committee noted in a report on public petitions in 2004—the same goes for many public petitions received by Members.59 It is usually a relatively straightforward task for the petition to be redrafted so that it conforms to the rules for paper petitions. Whilst this petition is not the one which has attracted signatures on the e-petition site, it is unlikely that the chair would object to a Member drawing attention, when presenting such a petition, to the number of signatures attracted by an e-petition in similar terms. In practice this is what happens in the case of a substantial proportion of the paper petitions presented to the House.
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\64. We recommend that the Petitions Committee should assume responsibility from BBCom for determining debates on petitions in Westminster Hall. The Chair of BBCom has explained to us how that responsibility never really sat well with her committee:60 the Petitions Committee, on the other hand, should consider it central to its responsibility to decide whether a petition—whether an e-petition or a petition presented through the traditional paper route—should be debated by the House. The Petitions Committee should not, however, be able to cut across the existing responsibility of the Backbench Business Committee to decide that a petition should be debated other than in the dedicated slot for petition debates in Westminster Hall. If the Petitions Committee decides that a petition deserves a debate on the floor of the House, it would take that request to the Backbench Business Committee, which could (but would not be obliged to) allocate backbench time for it. If BBCom were unable to prioritise a debate on the petition over the matters brought before it by other Members, it would be for the Petitions Committee to decide whether to have the matter debated in Westminster Hall, or whether to return to BBCom with a renewed request at a time which it judged more propitious.