Legislation / 2014 100% open

What data is expected?

This data category requires all national laws and statutes available to be available online, although it is not a requirement that information on legislative behaviour e.g. voting records is available. To satisfy this category, the following minimum criteria must be met:

• Content of the law / status
• If applicable, all relevant amendments to the law
• Date of last amendments
• Data should be updated at least on quarterly

What data is available

•   Openly licensed? Yes(Here)
•   Is the data available for free? Yes
•   Is the data machine readable? Yes (XHTML, XML, RDF/XML, PDF)
•   Available in bulk? Yes
•   Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? Yes
•   Publicly available? Yes published by National Archives)
•   Is data in digital form? Yes
•   Is the data available online? Yes (Here)
•   Does the data exist? Yes

Details

A comprehensive database of UK legislation is maintained online by The National Archives, an agency of the Ministry of Justice. The information is re-usable under the UK's Open Government Licence. -- update after asking National Archives and checking online --- A variety of machine readable formats are available through the API - see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats (amended machine-readable to yes and updated formats). Currently the database is not downloadable in bulk. Initially the target was to provide this by end-March 2014

Update on Bulk Download: We received the following response following a request for an update on the progress that has been made towards offering bulk download: " We have made some progress on bulk downloads and there is currently a project underway to make bulk downloads of all legislation.gov.uk data publicly available. Some data is already available at http://leggovuk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ in XML and HTML formats. However it should be noted that this is a trial site that is expected to change. New legislation is published on a daily basis as are amendments to existing legislation. The download site is currently still in development so is not being regularly updated with new content at the present time. At the moment there are no bulk downloads available for PDFs. The data on legislation.gov.uk has been collated over a number of years from a variety of sources and is not all in the same base format. We plan to make available a dataset of original print PDFs - these are versions of the original hardcopy documents as published. However, we do not hold all legislation in this format so this will not contain all the legislation on the website."

Reviewer comments

Accurate