Fri, 03 Feb 2006

UK Acts online

I can't believe in this day and age that OPSI (formerly HMSO) still don't have copies of UK acts of parliament before 1988 online. According to their website:

Q. Why do you only display legislation back to 1988?

A. The website was launched in 1996. Initially, legislation was only available from that year. In 2000 we took the decision to include older legislation for which we had electronic files. These files only dated back to 1988. Prior to this, legislation is only available in its original print format.

I don't think it's acceptable to say "Oh it's a bit of work to make them available." If Project Gutenberg can make 17,000 out of copyright works available, I fail to see why the government, who have resources at their disposal, can't make the text of approximately 3000 acts from the last 100 years available. This makes several key acts which govern us today unavailable to the UK public, including the Telecommunications Act 1984, Sale of Goods Act 1979, Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 and Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977.

On a similar note, they have only just started making PDF files avilable for download (since October 2005). They don't appear to be planning on making existing documents available in PDF. Again, I don't think it would be too hard to make all their content availble in alternative formats.

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Comments

If IIRC, acts of parliament are under Crown Copyright, which allows reproduction for non-commercial purposes. So...we could do it ourselves?
Posted by Matthew W. S. Bell at Fri Feb 3 18:27:54 2006
We could do it, but it would involve getting paper copies of the Acts, but I suspect they wouldn't be free, so someone would need to purchase them. http://www.tsoshop.co.uk appears to sell copies of the Acts for around 6GBP per act, which could get awfully expensive, rather quickly.
Posted by JD at Fri Feb 3 20:40:43 2006
Perhaps you could go to a library, sit there and scan them? It would be a lot of work for one person - perhaps a website which accepts uploads of electronic copies of legislation, which would then need proofing. A lot like Project Gutenberg, in fact.
Posted by Tim at Fri Feb 3 23:29:31 2006
For comparison:

The full, consolidated text of most Finnish legislation currently in force, all of the recent legislation in any case, are online at a government-operated website. I believe they're still missing some old, obscure bits, but I haven't found any holes in the data.
Posted by Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho at Sat Feb 4 19:56:38 2006

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