A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, September 1999.
HMSO’s Legislation website gives access to the full texts of Acts published since January 1996, plus the Data Protection Act 1984, the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995; explanatory notes of Acts from 1999 and summaries of a wide range of earlier Acts comprising long title, arrangement of sections, ISBN, page content and price. The full texts of all Statutory Instruments passed from January 1997 are also published.
The legislation home page now gives access to four libraries: UK Legislation and one for each of the three new legislatures for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
HMSO’s aim is ‘to publish these documents on the internet simultaneously or at least within 24 hours of their publication in printed from. However, any document which is especially complex in terms of its size or its typography may take longer to prepare.’
You can search across the legislation databases using the Muscat search engine which accommodates natural language search terms, such as ‘Statutes on companies published in 1998’.
It is worth noting that the Acts appear as originally passed by Parliament, ie unamended, and with no indication of which sections are in force. These are fairly basic deficiencies both for the lawyer and for the unsuspecting layman who takes the text to be a statement of the current law – a deficiency addressed by the Statute Law Database (see below).
The Acts are accessed by year from an alphabetical list by title. The arrangement of sections of each Act is presented, and each section title provides a link to the text of that section. Sections are presented in chunks, generally corresponding to Parts or Chapters of the Act, so that one can scroll up and down across contiguous sections. Links are provided at the top and bottom of each chunk to return to the previous chunk or continue to the next. Hypertext links to cross-referenced sections are, however, not provided.
The presentation of SIs is similar to that of the Acts, though each SI is generally presented complete on one web page, and hypertext links to footnotes (giving numbers of, but not links to, cross-referenced Acts and SIs) are provided.
The SIs are listed by year and number, so if you don’t know the SI number, you will need to find the SI using the HMSO site search facility.
The Statute Law Database
The Statutory Publication Office, an office within the Lord Chancellor’s Department, is responsible for maintaining a database of primary and secondary legislation and is producing a database of United Kingdom legislation – the Statute Law Database (SLD) – which contains legislation dating from the Magna Carta to the present day and also prospective legislation.
This database will be completed in the year 2000 when it is planned to provide users with access to it via the internet, and to sell electronic copies of the data for purchasers to merge with their own products. The marketing and pricing strategy has not yet been finalised.
The database under development currently contains the text of all Acts that were current on 1 February 1991, together with most of the Acts and Statutory Instruments passed since then. It also contains local legislation, both primary and secondary. Currently, the main task of the Statutory Publications Office is to apply the effects of amending legislation on primary legislation. At present there are no plans to amend secondary legislation but this could be done if it was shown to be cost-effective.
The key feature of the central database being maintained by the Statutory Publications Office is that it will provide a historical view of primary legislation for any specific day from the base date of 1 February 1991 and any prospective legislation. Although secondary legislation is not being updated the enquiry system will facilitate the identification of any legislation that amends or repeals it.
The SLD is being developed by Syntegra, a BT company, and a demonstration version of the is available on the Syntegra Track Record website. The demonstration version contains legislation for the years 1985 to 1995.
Parliamentary proceedings
The UK Parliament site www.parliament.uk publishes both Commons’ and Lords’ Hansards, as well as Bills before Parliament, the Weekly Information Bulletin, Select Committee reports and Lords’ judgments since November 1996.
The Bills listing gives the titles of public bills currently before Parliament which are available in full text on the site. At the head of each bill is a note of the stage which the bill has reached in its passage through Parliament. A complete list of public bills introduced in Parliament in the current session, together with information about their progress through Parliament, can be found in the Weekly Information Bulletin. Bills which have been passed by both Houses and have received Royal Assent as Acts of Parliament are available in full text on the HMSO legislation pages.
You can search the parliamentary databases, first selecting from a range of documents (Bills, Commons Hansards etc or All). Searches are either in your own words (free text) or by the name of an individual (speaker). You can also specifically include a Parliamentary Question number in your search, and optionally specify a date range.
There are equivalent resources on the Scottish Parliament site on the Parliamentary Business pages and on the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly sites. As the nomenclature is somewhat different in each jurisdiction and each site uses a distinctive design and layout, it is difficult to draw comparisons with the UK Parliament site.
Featured links
HMSO: Legislation
Syntegra: Statute Law Database
UK Parliament
Scottish Parliament
Welsh Assembly
Northern Ireland Assembly
