How do you rebuild trust in politics? 13,000 people (and counting) have an idea.

Yesterday, more than 13,000 signatures arrived at Downing Street asking the PM to launch a National Commission on Electoral Reform in his first 100 days.

Politics loves a fresh start.

A new Prime Minister arrives. A new Cabinet is assembled. New priorities are announced. Westminster dusts itself off, everyone talks about turning the page and, for a few weeks at least, it all feels a bit hopeful again.

Andy Burnham has certainly wasted no time in getting to work. He has spoken about rebuilding trust in politics, doing things differently and listening more closely to people across the country. After years in which politics has too often felt like something done to people rather than with them, that’s a welcome change of tone.

But every new government eventually arrives at the same question. How exactly do you rebuild trust?

Yesterday, more than 13,000 people offered one answer.

We took their names to Downing Street with a simple request: establish an independent National Commission on Electoral Reform within the Prime Minister’s first 100 days.

Those weren’t just names on a spreadsheet. They were people from every corner of the UK who believe how we elect our MPs must be part of the conversation on rebuilding trust in politics.

Reading through the thousands of comments people left alongside their signatures, a pattern quickly emerged. People wanted to know their vote counts. They wanted Parliament to reflect how people actually vote. They wanted to stop feeling as though where they happen to live determines whether their voice is heard.

Different words. Different experiences. The same underlying frustration.

There was something else in those comments too. Hope.

Politics can be a cynical business. People have grown used to promises being made, forgotten and quietly replaced by the next announcement. It would have been easy for the comments to become another catalogue of complaints.

Instead, thousands of people saw an opportunity.

They pointed to this new Government as a chance to do something previous governments have consistently avoided: take the question of how we elect our MPs out of the usual political trench warfare and hand it to an independent, evidence-led National Commission that puts voters at its heart and follows the evidence wherever it leads.

Another thing that struck me while reading through the comments on the petition was how rarely people talked about political parties. They talked about fairness. They talked about representation. Above all, they talked about wanting politics to work better.

Most people don’t lose sleep over electoral systems. They lose sleep over the cost of living, finding somewhere affordable to live or getting a GP appointment.

People care about democracy because they care about whether politics is capable of solving those problems. If they stop believing the system itself is fair, it becomes much harder to convince them that the decisions it produces deserve their confidence.

A government that genuinely wants to rebuild trust should at least be willing to ask whether the rules of our democracy still deserve that trust.

One of the clearest ways to show you’re serious about doing politics differently is to be willing to examine the rules by which politics itself operates.

The Prime Minister has spoken about doing politics differently.

Thousands of people have just suggested one place to begin.

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The clock is already ticking

Today is day 10 of the Prime Minister’s first 100 days.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll keep making the case that rebuilding trust in politics starts with giving people confidence that our elections are fair.

More than 13,000 people have already joined that call. If you haven’t yet, add your name today and help make these first 100 days count.