HCPP (House of Commons Parliamentary Papers)

Today I learnt about HCPP (House of Commons Parliamentary Papers).

It's a paid-for service that provides access to 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to the present day. It is complete from 1801 to present day. According to the website HCPP "includes the full text from Hansard, the Official Report of debates in Parliament, from both the House of Commons and House of Lords, from 1803 to 2005". Each page includes images, detailed indexing, and you can search across the full-text.

It's a service aimed at academic institutions, public libraries and other specialist art libraries so I don't think commercial law firms qualify (but I'm not 100% sure on this point). In any case it looks useful if you are a law student, academic law librarian or a private researcher.

HCPP website:
http://parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk/

Thanks to my colleague Sam for this one.

Parliament TV's on-demand archive

Today I learnt that Parliament TV provides an on-demand archive of parliamentary proceedings back to 2009. It covers all public proceedings, including debates and committee meetings of both Houses.

You can search the archive by date, institution or keyword:
http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Archive.aspx

Find out more about it:
http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/About.aspx

And, of course, Parliament TV allows you to watch the live debates as well.

Bill Index Database - Providing Links to Hansard Debate for Individual Bills

Today I learnt that there is a Bill index database that provides links to the Hansard debate for each stage of a Bill as it passes through Parliament. It can be accessed here:

http://bills.ais.co.uk/AC.asp

The legislation.gov.uk website says the Bill index database provides “links to the full text of a Bill, the Hansard debate, and any proposed amendments.” *

* http://www.legislation.gov.uk/new

Personally I can’t see where it links to the full text of the Bill (perhaps I’m missing something). I also can’t quite figure out whether it only includes Bills currently before Parliament or also older ones (again, perhaps I’m missing something). If I don’t need to see the Hansard, I think I’ll probably stick to tracking Bills before Parliament using the Parliament website:

http://services.parliament.uk/bills/