In the early 2000s, both the Government and the House of Commons began to explore ways for the public to start and sign petitions electronically.

[2] The original e-petitions process was created by Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair in November 2006 and hosted on the Downing Street website.

[11][12][13] The Petitions Committee was formed in 2015 during David Cameron's Conservative government and e-petitions were relaunched in July 2015 on the Parliament website.

[20][17][21] The second most signed petition, with 4.2 million signatories, requested that Parliament hold another referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union if the result of the June 2016 "Brexit" referendum was "less than 60% based on a turnout less than 75%" (which threshold was not reached), but Parliament did not comply with the petitioners' request.

[24][25] 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.

[26][27][28] A subsequent petition launched in January 2017 called for Donald Trump to be banned from an official state visit to the UK following his election as U.S. president, and received over 1.8 million signatures.

[30] 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.