Guidance for Petition Officers

You must send an official petition notice to electors and proxies as soon as practicable after determining the signing places.1 In practice, given the information required for the notices, this is likely to be after the notice of petition has been published. 

The petition notices are the equivalent of poll cards at elections and referendums. The notices are prescribed and must include:2  

• the name of the MP who has become subject to the petition process
• the name of the constituency of that MP
• the recall petition condition that has been met in relation to that MP 
• the elector’s name, qualifying address and number on the register
• the dates of the beginning and end of the signing period
• the situation of the elector’s petition signing place allotted to them and the days and hours during which the petition will be available for signing at that place 
• the list of accepted photographic ID to be presented by the elector
• such other information as the Petition Officer considers appropriate

Petition notices must be sent to the elector’s qualifying address3 or, in the case of a proxy, to the proxy’s address as shown in the list of proxies. You must not send a petition notice to overseas electors.

If you are using an external contractor to manage the production and delivery of petition notices, you should ensure that you have the necessary quality assurance and contract management processes in place, as you would for the production of poll cards at an election.  

An update of the registration data resulting from any elector being added to the petition register after the initial submission should be sent to your printers as soon as practicable to enable the production of petition notices. 

Petition notices may be delivered by hand, by post, or by some other method determined by you as the most appropriate.4 Whichever method you choose, you should put arrangements in place to manage the process and monitor the delivery of the notices in a similar way as you would when arranging the delivery of poll cards at an election. 

In order to ensure that electors receive the information they need and within time for them to sign the petition, you should ensure that petition notices are received by electors as soon as possible, so that they have the maximum amount of time to apply to sign the petition by post should they want to do so. 

An anonymous elector’s petition notice must be sent in a covering envelope to the elector’s qualifying address or, where a different address has been specified on their registration application, the petition notice must be sent to that other address.5