What are the solutions that “Free Our Bills” proposes?
In an ideal world, we would like Bills (and related instruments such as amendment lists and Public Bill Committee debates) to be published in a structured data format, with all relevant metadata, as soon as is possible. This doesn’t just mean “publishing bills online” as is currently done – it means publishing them online in such a way that each bit can be referred to and, more importantly, contains the data necessary to join things up – e.g. when an amendment paper says a particular amendment is going to change from halfway through line 15 to line 18 of page 3, that amendment has its own ID, and contains the means to point out what ID or IDs in the Bill are going to be changed by this amendment. When a Public Bill committee votes on a particular clause of a Bill, that reference is linked to the ID, so it can be cross-referenced to what is being voted on. This would be of use not just to the public, but to MPs, drafters, and everyone involved in the process. As an alternative, weaker,
