DCA statute law database
This request came from Francis Irving, one of the creators of the websites Public Whip and They Work For You. He is trying to create a publicly accessible database of all statute law. In the UK, although the public funds the courts and public representatives pass laws, the public do not have free access to the law. We are deemed to know the law, and yet nowhere can the common man or woman freely access the updated laws of the UK.
In order to remedy this undemocratic state of affairs, Francis made an FOIA request to the Department for Constitutional Affairs asking for a database dump in machine-readable format of current statute law from the newly implemented Statute Law Database editing system. He would then use the code to create a user friendly, publicly accessible resource that everyone could use.
Ideally he wanted the data in XML format on CD or DVD ROM, but as his initial request makes clear he was open to whatever format was convenient for the DCA. The DCA did not contact him except to reject his request based on cost. Under Section 16 of the FOIA, a public authority is under a duty to advise and assist applicants so their requests can be answered. The DCA’s FOI team could not even pick up the telephone to talk to Francis and see if there was a way to provide him with the information he needed. And this is a project that benefits the whole public, something one would have thought the DCA would encourage. Apparently not. Francis is now appealing the DCA’s unhelpful refusal. Such an unwillingness to negotiate on information of such public value, shows the DCA to be one of the least open or helpful central government departments - irony indeed considering they are the department charged with implementing FOI across Government.
- 19 Sept 2005 Posted request to DCA
- 20 Sept 2005 Request arrived at DCA
- 22 September 2005 Acknowledged receipt from DCA
- 17 October 2005 Received response from DCA (page 1) (page 2)
October 31st, 2005 at 10:21 pm
This is an issue which has been around like a bad smell since the mid-1990s, and I wrote about in 1997-8. My understanding is that while LCD were initially considering publication of the database on the web, in the end they decided to sell the product to legal publishers. Why they couldn’t have put the plain vanilla version online for free and leave legal publishers to sell the ‘value-added’ annotated versions, I don’t know. It would be worth making requests for this sort of policy material, as well as for the database itself.
November 8th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
I think the initial request was *way* too wide. It would take DCA, even with the use of this database, an extremely long time to go through every single law in every field to confirm which is currently in force. The subscription service provided by Lexis-Nexis lists over 7,500 statutes, most of which have dozens of provisions, all of which would need to be checked.
A more focussed request, for instance, for the laws establishing the NHS or regulating police authorities, or for a particular statute, as currently in force may be more likely to get a positive result.
February 8th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
While it will be 15 years late, the law-in-force version of the SLD _will_ be published online for free public access. What won’t be free is access to point-in-time versions which will enable one to see what the law was at a past date. The DCA’s response to Francis Irving’s request for an XML dump rejects it on the grounds of cost, saying it would require “changes to the system software as well as many hours of manual intervention”. However, surely the facility to export the data in a standard format must be built in if they intend to flog the data to the publishers for commercial exploitation, which is still their intention? Last word from Tony Hopkins, in charge of the project at the DCA, was that “This month [September 2005] sees us start to pull together the requirement for the public version which is still scheduled for pilot at the start of next April.”
September 23rd, 2006 at 5:24 pm
Does anyone know what the latest is on this?
I am campaigning for important laws prior to 1988 to be published on the OPSI website.
http://www.pledgebank.com/uklaws
September 24th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Reply to message posted by Nick Evans, November 8, 2005.
Ignorance of the law is no defence yet there is no free facility for members of the public to have access to consolidated texts of UK legislation (let’s not even mention case law). The government has all this information, I believe there is already an internal system allowing civil servants access to up-to-date texts in order to allow them to create yet more secondary legislation. The argument that it would cost too much is therefore, with all due respect, total nonsense. It all comes down to the fact that this government (perhaps any UK government, at that) does not believe that free access to such materials is to be permitted. Yes, we have HMSO/OPSI but the information here is, with all due respect, useless if you don’t know whether it is up-to-date or not. For example, the text of repealed SIs is still available on-line. Other more enlightened European countries have already published consolidated texts of all their laws, see: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/ (translations into Spanish and English) and http://www.normeinrete.it/. The difference between the attitude of these countries and that of the UK is that they believe that access to such information is a right and not a privilege.