The UK Parliament petitions website was founded in July 2015, to allow members of the public to petition the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Although the UK Parliament's Petitions Committee considers all petitions which receive 100,000 signatures or more, there is no automatic parliamentary debate of those that pass this threshold.
In its first year, a total of 36,000 petitions were submitted, attracting 6.4 million signatures.
As of June 2016 the most successful petition, with over four million signatories, was one to require referendums to have a supermajority; this had been started in May 2016 before the Brexit referendum, by a supporter of Brexit.
A petition in December 2015 sought to ban Donald Trump from entering the UK; this gained more than 550,000 signatories and caused the website to crash.
In March 2016, a petition calling for provision of meningitis B vaccine to all children in the UK received over 800,000 signatures, and the issue was subsequently debated in Parliament.
A petition launched in January 2017 called for Trump to be banned from an official state visit to the UK following his election as U.S. President, and has so far received over 1.8 million signatures.
Effectiveness
Emma Howard of The Guardian newspaper questioned the value of the website in 2014, claiming that it creates false expectations. Of the ten campaigns that garnered most signatures in 2016, four were denied a debate and none has so far succeeded in obtaining its intended outcome or implementing real change.