| Summary
The Procedure Committee has considered two recommendations relating to Public Petitions, made by the Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons in its recent Report Connecting Parliament with the Public (the relevant part of which is reproduced in Appendix 1). The first of these was also relevant to the Liaison Committee, which our Chairman consulted by letter (the exchange of correspondence is in Appendix 2). Our recommendations are as follows:
1. As agreed by the Liaison Committee, petitions should not be formally referred to the relevant departmental select committees, but a copy of each petition should be sent to the relevant committee at the same time as one is sent to the relevant Government department. Committees would be free to take action on the petition, or not, as they saw fit. The existing procedure of receiving Ministerial observations on petitions would continue, and such observations (or the notification that no observations were being made) would be forwarded to the relevant committee.
2. The top sheet of the petition should no longer be required to be handwritten, but the existing rules preventing alterations should continue. To avoid petitions having to be re-drafted after they have been received by Members, intending petitioners are encouraged to obtain the rules about petitions from the Parliamentary web site[1] or from the Journal Office.
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