3. What progress he has made on implementing the recommendations of the Procedure Committee on debates on e-petitions. (111330)

Following the Procedure Committee’s report, we have updated and improved the e-petitions website. We have improved, for instance, the wording of the site and the search and submission functions, making the process easier and clearer for the more than 3 million people who have signed an e-petition since August last year.

Does the Deputy Leader of the House agree that one solution to the problem of debating e-petitions would be for the Government to table a motion allowing Westminster Hall sittings on Monday afternoons during which e-petition topics could be debated?

We are very sympathetic to that view. In fact, we said in our response to the Procedure Committee’s report that we supported its proposals for a pilot. It is for the Procedure Committee to present such proposals in Back-Bench time, but we are working well with the Committee to enable the House to reach what I hope will be a swift decision.

I think that the Deputy Leader of the House will accept that our old friend Tony Wright, who was responsible for the recommendations of the Public Administration Committee, would want the House continually to evaluate the way in which their implementation is working. There is no doubt about the success of the Backbench Business Committee, but e-petitions seem to have been taken over by elements of the popular press such as The Sun and the Daily Mail. How are we going to react to that? It is not the way in which the system was intended to work.

The hon. Gentleman has raised an important point. This was never intended to be simply a cut-out-and-send-back element in a tabloid newspaper’s campaign, but there is no evidence that all e-petitions are of that type: in many cases, they constitute a genuine expression of public sentiment on a subject. Besides, we have the filter of the Backbench Business Committee, which considers whether the House has already debated the issue in question, or will have an opportunity to do so in the near future. When the Committee considers it right for a debate to take place, it will stage one, and I think that it is doing a very good job in that regard. However, we are constantly evaluating what has happened, and we are keen to learn from the experience in order to make the arrangement even better.