endomorphosis/ipfs_uk_local_acts

UK Local Acts (legislation.gov.uk)

About 99% of rows have no legal text: 19,972 of 20,171 are title and metadata only. legislation.gov.uk holds these Local Acts (1801–1990) only as print scans with no text layer. No XML or text version is published. These rows are flagged metadata_only: true and text_source: "title_only" in metadata_json, with law_status = "metadata_only". Their text field holds the title only, and metadata_json.pdf_url links to the official scan PDF. Only 199 Acts (all Acts from 1991 onward, plus 11 older ones) have full text and section/schedule rows. Use the fulltext / fulltext_articles configs if you need text. Text may be appended into the same rows later. IDs are derived from the legislation.gov.uk address and will not change.

Status: EXPAND (not COMPLETE). Not legal advice. This is not the official version. The authoritative text is on legislation.gov.uk.

Snapshot

Field	Value
Collection date	2026-10-04 (feed enumeration and fetch, 15:01–15:21 PT)
Source	legislation.gov.uk (The National Archives). Official host only: no mirrors or web archives
Document type	UK Local Acts (ukla), 1801–2026
Laws (catalogue rows)	20,171
Full-text Acts	199 (182 enacted, 17 current revised versions)
Metadata-only rows	19,972 (print scan only)
Article rows	3,891 (3,606 sections + 285 schedules), all belonging to the 199 full-text Acts
Jurisdiction	GB-LOCAL (locality_guess in metadata_json, from a short-title heuristic, for 12,255 rows)
License	OGL-UK-3.0
Collector	scrapers/gb_ukla_collect.py (+ scrapers/gb_ukla_client.py)

Configs

Laws and articles have different schemas, so each one gets its own config.

config	rows	file
default	20,171 laws (all, metadata-only rows flagged)	data/laws.parquet
articles	3,891 section/schedule rows	data/articles.parquet
fulltext	199 laws (full-text Acts only)	data/fulltext/laws.parquet
fulltext_articles	3,891 rows (articles of the 199 full-text Acts)	data/fulltext/articles.parquet

from datasets import load_dataset
laws = load_dataset("endomorphosis/ipfs_uk_local_acts", split="train")                       # all 20,171
ft   = load_dataset("endomorphosis/ipfs_uk_local_acts", "fulltext", split="train")           # 199 with text
arts = load_dataset("endomorphosis/ipfs_uk_local_acts", "fulltext_articles", split="train")  # their sections

Schema

• laws: id (e.g. ukla-2003-1, ukla-vict-42-43-194), title, text, source_url, source_type, jurisdiction, country, language, eli (legislation.gov.uk URI), date, date_issued, retrieved_at, license, law_status (current / enacted / metadata_only), identifier, official_identifier, article_count, json_path, metadata_json.
• articles: law_id, id (<law_id>-section-<n> / <law_id>-schedule-<n>), title, text, source_url, document_number, article_number, record_type (article / schedule), metadata_json.
• IDs come from the URI path because regnal citations repeat (year, chapter) across sessions.

Coverage by decade

decade	items	full text (XML)	print scan only	article rows
1800s	1,075	0	1,075	0
1810s	1,519	0	1,519	0
1820s	1,046	0	1,046	0
1830s	1,098	0	1,098	0
1840s	1,070	0	1,070	0
1850s	1,275	3	1,272	185
1860s	1,524	1	1,523	144
1870s	1,667	2	1,665	41
1880s	1,779	0	1,779	0
1890s	1,909	0	1,909	0
1900s	1,139	3	1,136	46
1910s	1,196	0	1,196	0
1920s	946	1	945	11
1930s	746	0	746	0
1940s	343	0	343	0
1950s	427	1	426	8
1960s	459	1	458	17
1970s	425	2	423	136
1980s	311	0	311	0
1990s	147	115	32	2,141
2000s	41	41	0	822
2010s	23	23	0	268
2020s	6	6	0	72

By citation style: calendar-year citations account for 1,269 items (188 full text). Regnal citations account for 18,902 items (11 full text): Victoria 9,487, George III 2,551, George V 2,525, Edward VII 1,066, George IV 1,046, William IV 673, George VI 492, Elizabeth II 432, and mixed sessions.

Provenance and method

• All data comes from legislation.gov.uk only: the Atom list feed for ukla (41 pages × 500), CLML data.xml for the 199 items with XML (Akoma Ntoso cross-checked on a hand-check sample), and links to the static /pdfs/ scans. The fetch obeyed robots.txt (crawl-delay 5; 5.5 s spacing) and the Fair Use Policy, with an identifying User-Agent. The full run made 189 requests with 0 errors.
• Print-scan PDFs were not bulk-downloaded or OCR'd. A pre-run sample of 9 scans had no text layer.
• Hand check (10 XML, 9 scans, 1 other): section and schedule counts matched the AKN versions exactly, with word coverage of at least 0.993.
• QA: 0 duplicate law or article IDs, 0 orphan articles, 0 article_count mismatches, 0 empty full-text rows, 0 article rows under 40 characters.

License and attribution

License: OGL-UK-3.0 (Open Government Licence v3.0, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/). Attribution: "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. © Crown and database right. Derived from content available from legislation.gov.uk (The National Archives)." UK Local Acts are Crown copyright (Acts of Parliament, CDPA 1988 s.164); legislation.gov.uk states all site content is under OGL v3 except where otherwise stated (exceptions concern EUR-Lex-derived material, none of which is in ukla). This dataset is not an official version; the authoritative text is on legislation.gov.uk. Metadata-only rows carry titles/citations and a pdf_url to the official print scan; their text field is the title only.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. UK Local Acts are Crown copyright (Acts of Parliament, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 s.164). This dataset is not the official version.