Our high streets are being taken over by betting companies whose business model is to create and exploit gambling addictions. This isn’t about placing the odd bet on a football match or horse race. Bookies use their electronic gambling machines to filter out that casual crowd: they’re looking for people with the potential for a serious gambling addiction. Fixed-odds betting terminals feed a dependency just as powerful as drugs or alcohol. Their high speed games, with stakes as high as £100 every twenty seconds, mean you can easily lose a month’s wages in under an hour. Eventually you realise you’re not doing it for the money – you’re doing it because you’re physically addicted to the rush. I’ve lost numerous jobs because of electronic gambling. I’ve lost two properties through failure to keep up with mortage payments, I've amassed £100,000s in debt, I’m separated from my wife and children, and I’m trapped in a situation where I can’t rent accommodation because my credit score is so low and I haven’t enough money for a deposit. Now I’ve got special blocks on my computer that stop me straying onto a betting site – I even had to disable them to set up this petition. We can do something to change the tide of misery and reclaim our high streets. We can sign this petition.

The Darwen 3 Day market plays a key part in the community of Darwen town centre. It provides a place for community to grow and for people to bond, it provides the livelihoods of dedicated and long-standing stall holders and local business people, it forms part of the story of Darwen and its people, and offers the potential for further growth and regeneration of this Lancashire town. The loss of this market, which is part of Darwen heritage, will deprive the community of a meeting place, traders of the businesses and loyalty they have worked hard for decades to develop and the town centre of another genre of commercial enterprise.

Good nutrition is essential to patients recovering in hospital. We believe that fruit and vegetables should be free to people in hospital. We are fully aware that the funding for such a idea is not there, however we are also aware that supermarkets throw away millions of pounds worth of perfectly healthy fresh fruit and vegetables every year and we want to stop this waste. We want supermarkets to deliver the fresh fruit and vegetables to local hospitals, where it will be available to patients. We want the hospital sweet trolley to be replaced by a free fruit trolley. Help us stop this waste and bring essential healing nutrition to the people that need it the most.

We can make a choice whether we wish to eat this food or not. We currently have no idea of the long term effects of this type of process

It's important to show that even giant companies need to have a conscience. British Airways has offered nowhere near enough compensation. It's costing Athena around £1500 a week in lost earnings and alternative care and transport costs - and it's been over a hundred days since her wheelchair was broken being loaded onto a BA flight at London City Airport. I don't know what their annual profit is, but they can well afford to make a humane gesture and replace her much needed wheelchair. Surely they would rather have positive publicity about this?

We are about to start a new build and have spent a year negotiating with SSEPD for an electricity connection. Their prices changed constantly, they sent the wrong contract to the Wayleaves team (the team that sort out the permissions with landowners) and then said that it was going to cost more because the works team had discovered a problem with the planned works on the quote. They say they won't tell us what the extra cost will be until they have done the work! So we have no idea if or what they might be planning to charge us on top of the amount we have already paid based on their quote.

More and more UK residents not only on benefits but in work reply on food banks to feed there family.

We, the undersigned, care deeply about the arts, and equally the natural environment and the rights of humans around the world. We believe arts and cultural institutions should break their ties with oil companies such as BP, a company which has caused repeated environmental catastrophes, including the Deepwater Horizon spill, and been implicated in numerous human rights violations. Furthermore, BP is turning a profit on the continued extraction of dirty fossil fuels, pushing us towards runaway climate change, whilst lobbying against environmental laws and clean energy alternatives [1, 2]. By accepting sponsorship from BP, cultural institutions give the oil giant much-needed positive publicity, and help it to obscure the destructive reality of its activities with a veneer of respectability. At the same time, oil sponsorship taints the reputation of the institutions that accept it. We recognise the vital importance of arts funding, particularly after public funding cuts. However BP sponsorship provides less than 1% of the annual income of the British Museum, Tate, and Royal Opera House, and just 3% of the income of the National Portrait Gallery [3], yet BP are allowed to place their name and logo alongside the names of these institutions, on their website and in exhibitions (despite many artists and arts workers having strong views against such branding) [4, 5]. BP needs these institutions far more than they need BP. This is the 26th year that BP has sponsored the Portrait Awards, through an agreement with the National Portait Gallery (NPG) in London. Fortunately this agreement is due to end this year. The NPG could choose not to renew the agreement, and to find a more appropriate sponsor for the Portrait Awards. However, negotiations about renewal are already underway. The NPG will not drop BP as a sponsor without strong pressure from the public and the arts sector. We need to act now. Over its 26 years of sponsorship, BP has repeatedly caused great harms to the environment and people; it has been responsible for multiple deadly explosions and oil spillages, including that of Deepwater Horizon, which killed 11 people, decimated ecosystems and livelihoods in the Gulf of Mexico, and resulted in the largest corporate fine in history [6]. It has traded with oppressive regimes from Azerbaijan to Libya, and has even been implicated in torture in Colombia [7]. It has recently expanded into tar sands, an extreme form of energy production which contaminates water and tramples on indigenous rights [8]. Worldwide, fossil fuel companies have currently laid claim to five times the volume of oil, gas and coal that humanity can burn without causing dangerous and destructive levels of global warming [9] - despite this, BP has stated that it will continue to explore and exploit new reserves of oil and gas into the future. In 1989, the National Portrait Gallery ended its eight-year Portrait Award sponsorship agreement with tobacco company John Player [10]. It is time for this national cultural institution to show such moral leadership and forward-thinking once again, by cutting ties with BP. As a partner of the National Portrait Gallery, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery can influence this decision. We call on this respected national cultural institution to put pressure on the NPG to find a more appropriate sponsor, and to refuse to host the BP Portrait Awards until a new sponsor has been found. For more information, please see: http://bp-or-not-bp.org/ http://bp-or-not-bp.org/scotland http://platformlondon.org/p-publications/picturethis/ References 1. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/may/02/bp-deepwater-horizon-oil-spills 2. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/21/bp-tops-the-list-of-firms-obstructing-climate-action-in-europe 3. http://platformlondon.org/p-publications/artoilinfographic/ 4. http://fossilfundsfree.org/who/ 5. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/24/no-oil-painting-bp-sponsorship-npg-portrait-award 6. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/02/bp-will-pay-largest-environmental-fine-in-us-history-for-gulf-oil-spill 7. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/22/gilberto-torres-survived-colombias-death-squads-now-he-wants-justice 8. http://environmentaldefence.ca/reports/canadas-toxic-tar-sands-most-destructive-project-earth 9. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 10. http://platformlondon.org/p-publications/picturethis/ 11. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-risks-as-conclusive-as-link-between-smoking-and-lung-cancer/

This is important due to the gambling addiction that has gripped this country. Gambling is an addiction that cannot be controlled and asking people to ban themselves from these establishments is not the answer to this problem especially with all the available online casinos and apps that can be downloaded. These companies and the television companies are still encouraging this horrible disease, people no longer have a choice when their addiction is being advertised as a fun , cool and exciting way to go about your spare time.

We need to pay a fair and living wage to those who produce our food etc for us, we need to know where it comes from and if it is sustainable. We need local farmers who are inspired to get up at 4.00am to go and milk their cows, and carry on until 19.00, when the children have already gone to bed, and who turns out on Christmas Eve when a cow is calfing and doesn't get in until 22.00. The farmer who loves his land, and cares for it with a passion, cutting hedges, leaving borders for wildlife, going out to listen to the sounds of nature, kieeping the countryside alive for us. I care about this issue, not only because farming affects our family, but because we need to know where our food comes from and how the animals and vegtables are gown, and treated. This is a global problem, but it starts at home, we have to be self sufficient, and teach the world to be self sufficient, and to do that the large supermarkets have to respect and reward farmers, as they would their management staff.

This government have made pledge after pledge , promise after promise to repair the damage from this disaster and to ensure that it never happens again, yet they have kept none of their promises . There is substantial evidence to show that logging has been a major cause of flooding in the region and yet the priority isn't to restore the road for local people but use it to recommence the very activity that caused the problem in the first place. This government has no concern for the environment or local interest but only for profit. It continues to make the same mistakes for its own greed. "The A591 repairs are a blag,it is in working order apart from the GAP which they are not working on,they seem to be concentrating their efforts on forestry operations! Something must be done!!! I saw lots of heavy forestry machinery using the road which is strange as we are being told it is undermined and I saw no evidence of the whole mountain moving!!!" 30 January 2016

Why focus on your town? The targets of this petition happen to be four major employers in my hometown of Bideford, Devon where I was elected on the Town Council in May 2015. One of the first actions I campaigned for was to pay all our staff the full living wage and to become affiliated with the foundation. I hoped this would set a good example to other employers in the area and encourage them to sign up on a voluntary basis. However many low paid people in the area are employed by one of these companies who set pay on a national level. So I came to the conclusion if I was to change this I would have to launch a wider campaign, hence this petition! If we at the Town Council can afford to pay our lowest paid staff a dignified wage in times of local government austerity, so can they! Furthermore most small towns in the UK will have at least one of these establishments in them. So by signing this petition you will almost certainly be helping people in your community as well! I like [insert company here], leave them alone! I also shop at ASDA and (occasionally) drink at spoons. Does this make me a hypocrite? Well no for two reasons. a) There is often little alternative for cheap groceries or a boozy meal in this supposedly free market of ours and b) I'm not saying we should boycott these companies, merely we as consumers and the British public are expressing our unhappiness that their staff are not being duly rewarded. It won't make a difference. A petition like this will never influence the decisions of a multinational corporation! Well neither will doing nothing! The most like petition I could find to this one from 2013 had 34,000 signatures(7); I am aiming for 250,000 this year. That is comparable number to the population of a large British city and hence a non-trivial fraction of their consumer base. If companies are supposed to pay attention to their customers, then they ignore this petition at their own risk! Sources: (1) http://citywire.co.uk/wealth_manager/share-prices-and-performance/share-factsheet.aspx?InstrumentID=3355 (2) http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/15/mcdonalds-serves-up-rising-uk-profits-despite-troubles-in-the-us (3) http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-asda-results-idUKKCN0S21LC20151008 (4) http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-3162940/JD-Wetherspoon-boss-branded-hypocrite-moaning-paying-staff-living-wage.html (5) http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/26/tesco-sales-drop-13-but-outperform-market-expectations (6) http://www.livingwage.org.uk/what-living-wage (7) https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/tesco-pay-your-workers-a-wage-they-can-live-on