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Keeping up-to-date with the law: Bills & legislation

Tips for keeping up-to-date with the law in your research area

Keeping up to date with the law

Introduction: Bills & Legislation

This part of the guide provides tips on monitoring bills going through the UK Parliament, proposals for new legislation, amendments to existing legislation and new government publications.

UK bills before parliament

If you want to track the progress of bills as they go through the UK parliament, you can do this very easily using the RSS option on the UK Parliament website. First choose the Bill you are interested in, then select RSS.

You will then receive an alert when the Bill reaches a new stage on its journey through parliament, when new Bill documents are published, when the Bill is republished, and when it receives royal accent and becomes an Act.

UK legislation and draft legislation (Acts and SIs)

One of the easiest ways to stay abreast of recently enacted legislation and newly published draft legislation is via the legislation.gov.uk website. You can sign up for RSS feeds for the following categories, but unfortunately subject RSS feeds are not available:

  • All Legislation (excluding drafts)
  • UK Public General Acts
  • UK Statutory Instruments
  • UK Ministerial Directions
  • Acts of the Northern Ireland Assembly
  • Northern Ireland Orders in Council
  • Northern Ireland Statutory Rules
  • Acts of the Scottish Parliament
  • Scottish Statutory Instruments
  • Acts of the Senedd Cymru
  • Wales Statutory Instruments
  • All Draft Legislation
  • UK Draft Statutory Instrument
  • Scottish Draft Statutory Instruments
  • Northern Ireland Draft Statutory Rules

TSO (The Stationary Office) publishes an online daily list, which includes details of parliamentary publications published each day. You have to monitor this list manually as no alert features are available.

 

UK Government publications

Gov.uk is an official government website that aims to bring together the content of all UK governmental departments into a single website. Through this website you can set up email alerts to topics and some pages by selecting get updates/get email updates and entering your email address. RSS updates are available on some pages, including the home pages of organisations e.g. the Attorney General's Office.

If you run a search using keywords there will be an option subscribe to an RSS feed at the top of the results page:

Forthcoming changes to legislation

Subscription databases like Westlaw UK or Lexis+ indicate whether there are any pending amendments to UK legislation.

On both Lexis+ and Westlaw UK an orange exclamation mark icon is displayed next to the provision that is due to be amended.