The Council welcomes petitions and recognises that petitions are one way in which people can let us know their concerns.
Petitions may be submitted at any time or, if you wish, they can be presented at any meeting of the Council or its Committees by Councillors or members of the public. If you would like to present your petition to the Council, or would like your Councillor to present it on your behalf, please contact Democratic Services on 01922 654765 at least 10 working days before the meeting and the process will be explained to you.
What type of petitions are accepted?
The Council welcomes traditional paper petitions and ePetitions.
If you wish to submit an ePetition using the Councils ePetition facility below please 'Register' your personal details using the link above and follow the prompts to create your ePetition.
What is a petition?
The Council considers a petition to be any communication which is signed by and sent to us on behalf of a number of people. For practical purposes we normally set a requirement for at least 10 signatures or petitioners before we treat the communication as a petition.
What should a petition include?
Petitions must include:
- A clear and concise statement covering the subject of a petition. It should state what action the petitioners wish the Council to take.
- The name and address and signiture of any person supporting the petition.
Petitions should be accompanied by contact details, including an address for the petition organiser. This is the person we will contact to explain how we will respond to the petition.
Petitions which are considered to be vexatious, abusive or otherwise inappropriate will not be accepted. In the period immediately before an election or referendum, we may need to deal with your petition differently – if this is the case we will explain the reasons and discuss a revised timescale. If a petition does not follow the guidelines set out above, the Council may decide not to do anything further with it. In that case, we will write to you to explain the reasons.
Procedure on receipt of a petition
Upon receipt of a petition, either presented at Council, Committee or received directly by the Council, an acknowledgement will be sent to the petition organiser within 10 working days. It will let them know what we plan to do with the petition and when they can expect to hear from us again.
Upon receipt of a petition, either presented at Council, Committee or received directly by the Council, an acknowledgement will be sent to the petition organiser within 10 working days. It will let them know what we plan to do with the petition and when they can expect to hear from us again.
If the petition has enough signatures to trigger a Council debate, or a senior officer giving evidence, then the acknowledgement will confirm this and tell you details. If the petition needs more investigation we will explain to you the steps we plan to take.
If the petition applies to a planning or licensing application or on a matter where there is already an existing right of appeal, other procedures apply, we will explain these to you and refer your petition to the appropriate place.
The full petitions scheme can be found in the Public Documents pages.
To create a new ePetition or sign an existing one please
click here.