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Draft Legislation 85% open

Great Britain

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Note: The methodology used in the Global Open Data Index has changed over time; significantly so between 2015 and 2016. For this reason, the results are not directly comparable over time.

What data is expected?

Data about the bills discussed within national parliament as well as votings on bills (not to mix with passed national law). Data on bills must be available for the current legislation period. Open data on the law-making process is crucial for parliamentary transparency: What does a bill text say and how does it change over time? Who introduces a bill? Who votes for and against it? Where is a bill discussed next, so the public can participate in debates? This data category draws on work by the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Declaration of Parliamentary Openness.

  • Content of bill
  • Author of bill
  • Votes on bill per member of parliament
  • Transcripts of debates on bill
  • Status of bill

How open is the data?

In Britain this type of information is the responsibility of Parliament, which is legally separate from government; however I have answered Yes on the basis that the institutions are equivalent in the sense of being official sources. (This submission does not cover data available from civil society sources such as mySociety.) All the data covered by this submission is re-usable under the terms of the Open Parliament Licence, which is compliant with the Open Definition. All of the data is discoverable as text records and in some parts via APIs and other mechanisms. However it is not organised sufficiently to support bulk downloads of the information. Documents and debates related to bills are presented in a manner that is accessible for reading, but generally information about bills is not available as structured data; and where structured data is available users need to familiarize themselves with the Parliament Data APIs in order to access it. Data on votes is particularly opaque.

Your submission is valid. Thank you very much for contributing to the Global Open Data Index.

Data location   https://www.parliament.uk/business/bills-and-legislation - Bills and legislation (Parliament)
   https://www.data.parliament.uk/dataset/53 - Bills Text XML (Parliament.data)
   https://www.data.parliament.uk/dataset/bills - Bills Metadata (Parliament.data)
   https://www.data.parliament.uk/dataset/09 - House of Commons Divisions (Parliament.data)
Data licence   https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright/
Data format   HTML, XML
Reviewer   Anton Shaffer
Submitters   Owen Boswarva
Last modified   Tue Dec 06 2016 21:48:28 GMT+0000 (UTC)

Contributors

Reviewers

  • Anton Shaffer

Submitters

  • Owen Boswarva
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