Petition the council

To create a petition we recommend you select an online petition service of your choice such as change.org  but you are free to use any online petition service you wish.

When creating an petition, you will need to enter various details including contact details, a title and explanation of what your petition is about, and whether or not you are representing an organisation.

Please also set a closing date by which you want people to sign it, and when you will submit it formally to the council for consideration. 

Submit your petition

As you will be using an online petition service that is not hosted on our website, your petition will not automatically be shown on our website.

If you would like us to promote your petition on our website, please send us a link to your petition as well as any other relevant details to governance-admin@lichfielddc.gov.uk 

If the petition is about something a different council or organisation is responsible for, we will not display the petition on our website.

Petition publication

After we've received your petition, we will check that it complies with our terms and conditions. We try to do this as quickly as possible, but in some cases it could take up to ten working days.

Once we have checked the petition, we will email you to let you know if it has been approved or rejected. If approved, we will publish the petition online within five working days.

If for any reason we cannot accept your petition, we will contact you to explain why. You may edit and resubmit the petition to comply with our terms, should you want to.

Petition close

When your petition reaches its closing date, please email governance-admin@lichfielddc.gov.uk . If you have also collected written signatures, please submit these at the same time (we are happy to accept scanned copies).  

Once we have received a closed petition, we will contact the author within ten working days to tell them what we are going to do in response to it, and when they can expect to hear from us again.

What we will do with the petition depends on how much support a petition gets:

• Fewer than 50 signatures will be passed to the relevant head of service for them to consider, but any response or action will depend on the issue.
• Between 50 and 1,000 signatures will trigger a review by the relevant head of service and cabinet member, who will decide what response or action is needed.
• More than 1,000 signatures will trigger a report that will be considered by Cabinet. If a petition is going to be discussed by Cabinet, or at any other formal meeting, we will promote the date, time and location of the meeting on this website. We will also email the petition author to let them know this information.  

We may need to deal with petitions differently in the run up to an election or a referendum. If this is the case, we will explain the reasons and discuss the revised timescale with the petition author.

What action will be taken

Once a petition has been considered, we will write to the petition author and post the information on the website. Depending on the petition, this could include:

• setting out our views about the petition's request.
• explaining that we will take the action requested in the petition.
• explaining why we will not take the action requested in the petition.
• explaining what action we will take, if any, in response to the petition.
• giving advice about how the subject raised in the petition might be pursued.