§ Lord Mulleyasked the Chairman of Committees:
How many petitions have been presented for consideration by the Select Committee on the Channel Tunnel Bill and what is the total number of individual petitioners, since in many cases petitions contain the signature of many supporters.
§ The Chairman of Committees (Lord Aberdare)Since the noble Lord tabled his Question, a full list of petitioners has been published as an Appendix to the Minutes of Proceedings. The list shows that 1,459 petitions were deposited. On close examinaton it has been found that two of these were duplicates of others already deposited.
It is not known how many signatures have been appended to the petitions. There are approximately 200 petitions which carry multiple signatures, some as many as 75. It would not be an economic use of staff time to provide an accurate total number of signatures.