Legislation is the law as it is passed by government. In addition to the Acts passed by parliament are Regulations, which are rules set by government departments and which operate under their respective Acts.

BAILII carries "legislation as passed ", which are the versions of the acts as they were at time of receiving Royal Assent.

The acts are split into sections. To get to the table of provisions, click Table from any section. This will list all the sections for that act. To print out the whole act, click Download and select a format. See printing, below for more information.

The BAILII legislation databases include hypertext links to most relevant material. These generally include the following:

• references to sections, parts and schedules within the current Act;
• references to definitions within the current Act;
• references to other Acts; and
• references to sections in other Acts.

Using Legislation

Within an Act each section is preceded by a number of "buttons". The meaning of these is as follows:

• BAILII Logo
  Clicking on the BAILII Logo will take you back to the BAILII home page.

• [Index]
  Takes you to the home page for the current database. You normally do this, if you want to select a different Act.

• [Table]
  Takes you to the entry of the current item in the Act's table of contents. This is useful if you want to go to a different section in the current Act, or if you just want to get an idea of where the current section sits within the Act.

• [Search]
  Lets you perform a free text search over the entire BAILII database (or parts of it).

• [Notes]
  Displays notes associated with the current Act.

• [Noteup]
  Searches for all materials which refer to the current section. This will display all other Acts and cases which refer to this section.

• [Previous]
  Takes you to the preceding section. This is useful for "stepping back" through an Act.

• [Next]
  Takes you to the next section in the Act.

• [Download]
  Displays a menu of formats in which to download the entire act as a single file. This is ideal for printing legislation.

• [Help]
  Gives you this page.

Dates in Legislation

When searching in Boolean Mode you can use the date operator to limit search results by date (or a date range -- see Search Help, esp Boolean Operators Chart).

In the legislation databases, the date for a piece of legislation is 1 January of the year in the title.

Printing Legislation

To print an individual section, go to the table of provisions for the act, select the section and then use your browsers print button to print the act.

To print the entire act, click Download at the top of the page. You will be asked to select a format. If available, you should always chose "RTF", since this is a widely used word processor format and is easy to work with. Click on "RTF" (or some other format if you prefer). You may be asked where you want to save the file. Chose an appropriate location, then click OK. Some browsers are configured to skip this step, and start your word processor automatically to load the document.

Most RTF files are compressed, and BAILII will send the document in compressed format if your browser supports it. The decompression occurs automatically and the only thing you should notice is that the download is faster. If you experience problems downloading, you should contact feedback.

About the Markup

Acts and regulations are "marked up" on a massively automated basis. We are constantly improving this process to add functionality. If you have suggestions, these are more than welcome. Please bear in mind that the mark up process is essentially heuristic in nature - that is, it is designed to make the mistake. We can't do much about acontextual links which depend on an understanding of natural (or even legal!) language. If you think that you can suggest a general approach to better taking into account the salient features which are inherent to most legislation, please send us feedback.