This website is maintained by Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform for your personal use and viewing. Access and use by you of this site constitutes your acceptance of these terms and conditions. This takes effect from the date on which you first use this website.

The purpose of the website is to enable as many people as possible to make their views known. All ideas or suggestions will be published on the Better Regulation website, providing they meet the criteria below.

People may freely disagree with the Government or call for changes of policy or legislation. There will be no attempt to exclude critical views and decisions to accept or reject will not be made on a party political basis.

However, to protect this service from abuse, the author of the idea or suggestion must satisfy some basic conditions.

To submit an idea or suggestion you must first complete the registration form. This ensure that we have basic contact information so that we can contact you for clarification is necessary.

The information in an idea or suggestion must be submitted in good faith. In order for the service to comply with the law and with the Civil Service Code, you must not include:

• Party political material;
• Potentially libellous, false, or defamatory statements;
• Information which may be protected by an injunction or court order;
• Material which is potentially confidential, commercially sensitive, or which may cause personal distress or loss;
• Material that names individual officials of public bodies, elected officials or their families;
• The names of individuals, or information where they may be identified, in relation to criminal accusations;
• Language which is offensive, intemperate, or provocative;
• Wording that is impossible to understand;
• Statements that don't actually request any action;
• Commercial endorsement, promotion of any product, service or publication, or statements that amount to adverts;
• Duplicate - similar to and/or overlap with existing petition;
• False name or address information;
• Issues for which the Better Regulation website is not the appropriate channel;
• Intended to be humorous, or has no point about government policy; or
• Contains links to other websites.

We reserve the right to reject:

• Duplicate ideas or suggestions;
• Ideas or suggestions which ask for things outside the remit or powers of the Government;
• Statements that don't actually request any action;
• Wording that is impossible to understand;
• Statements that amount to advertisements;
• Ideas or suggestions which are intended to be humorous, or which have no point about government policy (however witty these are, it is not appropriate to use a publicly-funded website for purely frivolous purposes);
• Issues for which an idea or suggestion is not the appropriate channel (for example, correspondence about a personal issue); or
• Freedom of Information requests. This is not the right channel for FOI requests; information about the appropriate procedure can be found at www.ico.gov.uk.

Ideas or suggestions that do not follow these guidelines cannot be accepted for consideration. In these cases, you will be informed of the reason your proposals has been refused. If this happens, we will give you the option of altering and resubmitting the proposal so it can be accepted for consideration.

If you decide not to resubmit your idea or suggestion or if the second iteration is also rejected, we will list your idea or suggestion and the reason for not accepting it on this website. We will publish the full text of your suggestion, unless the content is illegal or offensive.

Once accepted for consideration, the idea or suggestion will be made available on the Better Regulation website for anyone to see. Anyone contributing to the idea or suggestion must provide their name and a verifiable email address. No personal details other than their name (and/or organisation name, if specified) will be published on the website. Information about any individual will not be used for any other purpose than in relation to the proposal, unless they choose to sign up for other services offered on this website. You can read more on this in our Privacy Policy.

It will usually take up to five working days from the time an idea or suggestion is received for it to appear on the website. For more information on the process, read our advice pages.)

Please note that we will aim to respond to each idea or suggestion within 90 days of it being posted on the website.

Hyperlinking from the Better Regulation website

We are not responsible for the content and the reliability of the websites we link to and do not necessarily endorse the views expressed within them. We aim to replace broken links to other sites but cannot guarantee that these links will always work as we have no control over the availability of other sites.