Many injustices and human dilemmas have been exposed through people petitioning the Scottish Parliament. Other countries have emulated Holyrood’s respected system, with delegations from Canada to Australia and South Africa learning from this Scottish success.

The Parliament’s Public Petitions Committee is often called the jewel in Holyrood’s crown. But has the sparkle dimmed?

As a former MSP on the founding committee in the first Scottish Parliament, I was alarmed when my enquiries revealed that as many as 479 petition proposals were rejected in the last four years. Holyrood accepted only 170 petitions in that period, whereas the Welsh Assembly accepted 356. Such a mountainous discard rate challenges the sacrosanct promise that petitioning is “the door to the Parliament’s founding principles of openness and sharing of power with the people”.

Petitioners show the truly magnificent range of caring, from compassion for human anguish to the suffering of pet rabbits.

*Widow Tina McGeever’s petition won patients the right to a life-prolonging new cancer drug on the NHS after her husband died, his poignant last wish being that others didn’t have to pay, as he had.

*A petition 15 years ago, demanding a Borders Railway, contributed to the imminent opening of the new £294 million line.

*A Glasgow 14-year-old, Ryan McLaughlin, whose mother has multiple sclerosis, secured an NHS campaign about the links between MS and vitamin D deficiency.

All 479 rejected proposals won’t be of that standard.

But it’s unacceptable that petitions committee members did not know of the high numbers, which I confirmed with the Scottish Parliament, until I contacted them. John Wilson, the Independent MSP, says: “Unfortunately, there seems to be more emphasis on the clerking administration than on the elected members. People believe it is the committee which has turned them down.”

Yet it was previous elected members who handed almost total power to reject or accept to clerks, without stipulations on being informed. In 2005, MSPs decided that “the committee should be required to take a decision on the admissibility of a petition only in cases of dispute.” (Usually one case annually.)

What a cop-out on the public’s earnest work. MSPs believe it’s impractical for them to see all proposals. Would sharing last year’s 185 proposals – only 47 survived – among seven politicians be too arduous?

There has been an astounding lack of curiosity from politicians as the rejects mountain built up. Which subjects were “banned” and why? We don’t know; nor do the MSPs. Wales lists publicly all rejections and the reasoning, as does Westminster; Scotland does not.

The 649 petition proposals that reached Holyrood in the past four years exceeded the 615 accepted and acted on in the first four years, 1999-2003. The sad difference is that only 170 out of 649 ideas were rated “admissible” in 2011-15 while 479 others did not reach MSPs after dismissal by clerks.

The Welsh Assembly dismissed 170 in the years Scotland dumped 479.

In 2003, the Petitions Committee won The Herald’s accolade of Holyrood’s best committee under the convenorship of Labour rebel John McAllion. He set the tone of pursuing the public’s ideas zealously. I witnessed the equal enthusiasm of the founding committee’s clerks, putting hours into helping petitioners.

“We need more rebels nowadays” says Tom Minogue, a three-times petitioner who gave up at his third petition. Mr Minogue, from Fife, added: “I’ve petitioned since the first committee, which welcomed controversy, but people changed later. Recently, I had battles with the clerks and gave up in disgust. Most people won’t challenge officials. But aren’t the MSPs supposed to be in charge?”

Back in the period 1999-2003, only 1.5 to two clerks handled eight new petitions a fortnight. In recent months, four clerks dealt with two new petitions fortnightly, plus continuing petitions.

With staffing shortage over, what is the problem? According to Mr Wilson:

“Too many rules, differing interpretations of rules and difficult to understand online guidance have been making it harder for people in recent years.” In June, Wilson voted against a new round of what he regards as restrictive rules proposed by the clerks but was the only MSP to object. He told me:

“We’re are still not getting enough petitions from people in less privileged areas and those with disabilities.”

The same was said by Dr Christopher Carman of Glasgow University, in his 2006 Assessment of the Scottish Parliament’s Public Petitions System. Nine years after he called for rejections to be published, that still hasn’t happened. He wrote: “While we certainly should not assume that the inadmissible petitions rules are used to ‘shut down’ petitions, but given the lack of transparency, we could not definitively show that they are not.”

In 2009, the Hansard Society also urged transparency, stating: “While the involvement of clerks has helped many people to present petitions to the Scottish Parliament, there is some suspicion about their role, which has been experienced by some as obstructive.” Only accepted, or “lodged”, petitions are made public, There’s no record of how many were turned down before 2011.

Some rules are highly questionable. The system declares that its primary role is to hold the Scottish Government to account, stating: “It has no remit to intervene in the operational decisions or actions of other public bodies in Scotland such as health boards and local authorities.”

This is ridiculous, particularly over unelected health boards; public anger erupts regularly over their diktats. Wales welcomes petitions about boards because they aren’t elected.

The Scottish Government spends more than £12 billion on health, so why is there any reluctance to let petitioners tackle largely unaccountable mandarins controlling most of our physical and mental health?

Dr Carman warned that lack of scrutiny could make petitioners question political neutrality. I’ve found no evidence of party politicking.

The present committee isn’t SNP dominated; two members from Labour, one Conservative and one Independent outnumber three SNP members. I attended a petitions meeting recently, where MSPs gave petitioners an excellent, politically unbiased hearing

It is getting past democracy’s door keepers to reach the committee that is the perceived hurdle. I’ve dealt with the European Parliament’s petitioning system and found Brussels not as difficult as the struggles of a Holyrood petitioner I encountered recently.

Yet the rest of the UK still lags behind Edinburgh and Cardiff.

Northern Ireland doesn’t have a petitions committee but hears around 17 petitions a year; only through a Stormont politician. Holyrood hears petitioners directly.

Sixteen years behind Scotland, Westminster has only this summer started its first petitions committee, but it is laughably inferior. Though starting with only six signatures, it demands 10,000 to secure a government response and 100,000 to gain a debate. Holyrood requests a minimum of only one signature and petitions have prompted many debates.

But London publishes rejects.

With Wales leading on transparency and acceptance, should the Scottish teacher heed the Welsh pupil?