UK Public General Acts

At a glance

Publisher

The National Archives (legislation.gov.uk) · homepage

Category

Legislation

Jurisdiction

United Kingdom

Publisher updates

A few Acts a month, clustered around Royal Assent days

SourceFinch checks

Daily by default

Records per run

50 in the latest run

Record key

id

Acquired from

Publisher's public API: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/data.feed?sort=published&results-count=50

Recipe

v1.0.0, approved October 13, 2026

Verified since

October 13, 2026

Last green run

October 13, 2026

What the data contains

Public General Acts are the primary legislation passed by the UK Parliament and given Royal Assent: from finance and supply Acts to criminal justice, planning and public health Acts. legislation.gov.uk, the UK statute book run by The National Archives, publishes each Act as enacted, usually within a day of Royal Assent, and lists them in an Atom feed. This source reads the 50 most recently published Acts and correction slips on each daily run and makes one record per item, keyed by its legislation.gov.uk identifier, with the short title, link, document type, year, chapter number and the publication and last-update times. Parliament passes a few dozen Acts a year, so the window spans more than a year. A monitor reports each new Act. Act texts are not fetched; short titles name the subject of the Act, not private individuals. SourceFinch is independent of The National Archives and of Parliament.

Fields and types

Every record has these fields. The key field id identifies a record across runs, so changes are reported field by field.

Sample output

The first 5 of 50 records from SourceFinch's own run on October 13, 2026, exactly as delivered.

[
  {
    "id": "http://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/ukpga/2026/25",
    "url": "http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2026/25/2026-07-15",
    "year": 2026,
    "title": "Supply and Appropriation (Main Estimates) Act 2026",
    "number": 25,
    "updated_at": "2026-08-18T11:48:53+01:00",
    "published_at": "2026-07-16T10:55:56.503633+01:00",
    "document_type": "UnitedKingdomPublicGeneralAct"
  },
  {
    "id": "http://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/ukpga/2026/26",
    "url": "http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2026/26/2026-07-15",
    "year": 2026,
    "title": "Taxation (Energy and Vehicles) Act 2026",
    "number": 26,
    "updated_at": "2026-08-11T16:18:26+01:00",
    "published_at": "2026-07-15T15:58:03.989258+01:00",
    "document_type": "UnitedKingdomPublicGeneralAct"
  },
  {
    "id": "http://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/ukpga/2026/27",
    "url": "http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2026/27/2026-07-15",
    "year": 2026,
    "title": "Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Act 2026",
    "number": 27,
    "updated_at": "2026-08-18T11:10:53+01:00",
    "published_at": "2026-07-15T15:52:42.140746+01:00",
    "document_type": "UnitedKingdomPublicGeneralAct"
  },
  {
    "id": "http://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/ukpga/2026/24",
    "url": "http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2026/24/2026-07-08",
    "year": 2026,
    "title": "National Security (State Threats) Act 2026",
    "number": 24,
    "updated_at": "2026-10-05T09:34:03+01:00",
    "published_at": "2026-07-08T17:54:58.625226+01:00",
    "document_type": "UnitedKingdomPublicGeneralAct"
  },
  {
    "id": "http://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/ukpga/2026/23",
    "url": "http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2026/23/2026-07-15",
    "year": 2026,
    "title": "English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026",
    "number": 23,
    "updated_at": "2026-07-31T14:02:00+01:00",
    "published_at": "2026-05-11T18:02:45.491003+01:00",
    "document_type": "UnitedKingdomPublicGeneralAct"
  }
]

Evidence behind every value

• Each run keeps the publisher's exact response, hashed with SHA-256. This sample came from a response with hash f9b6ba86cc96529dd3e747cb4251fd638d236978ba349159ba7d5bfbd76c9c77.
• Every value records where it came from in that response: a CSS path into the retained capture.
• Each run gets a signed manifest (Ed25519) timestamped by an RFC 3161 authority: this run's manifest hash is aa4fa1b1394cad37e2eeed9b080cd8736a390bafc8b4e74863adfb83c9a85ecc, timestamped October 13, 2026.
• The compliance state at capture is recorded with the evidence: robots.txt hash and verdict, AI-preference signals, crawler identity and the usage rights below.
• Download any run as an evidence bundle (WACZ) and check it offline, without trusting SourceFinch: sourcefinch verify-bundle run.wacz.

Terms posture and usage rights

legislation.gov.uk, run by The National Archives, states that all content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated, which permits copying, publishing, adapting and commercial use with attribution. Its fair use policy welcomes commercial data re-users and crawlers that identify themselves with a user agent carrying contact details, follow robots.txt (crawl delay 5 seconds) and stay under 1,500 requests in any 5-minute period; it suggests bulk channels for large crawls. This source makes one feed request per daily run with SourceFinch's declared user agent. robots.txt allows the feed path (it disallows only PDF and DOCX renditions and /defralex).

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: legislation.gov.uk (The National Archives). SourceFinch is independent of the publisher.

Usage rights travel with every record SourceFinch delivers (API, exports, webhooks and evidence bundles). They are our documented understanding of the publisher's stated terms, not legal advice.

Reliability

Runs, last 30 days

1

Green

100%

Failed

0

Median run time

1.5 s

Latest run

success, October 13, 2026

Measured on completed runs of this recipe version across SourceFinch, anonymized, within a rolling 30-day window. First successful observation: October 13, 2026. A new recipe has only the history collected since that date; this is not a 30-day uptime guarantee.

Use it

Every surface creates the same monitor from this Verified recipe. Monitors keep record history, report field-level changes and deliver by webhook, export or email. You confirm you have the right to collect the source (rights: true).

{
  "schema": "sourcefinch/source@1",
  "name": "UK Public General Acts",
  "url": "https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/data.feed?sort=published&results-count=50",
  "recipe": {
    "mode": "http",
    "format": "xml",
    "items": "entry",
    "fields": {
      "id": "id",
      "url": "link:not([rel])@href",
      "year": "ukm\\:Year@Value",
      "title": "title",
      "number": "ukm\\:Number@Value",
      "updated_at": "updated",
      "published_at": "published",
      "document_type": "ukm\\:DocumentMainType@Value"
    },
    "required": [
      "id",
      "title",
      "updated_at"
    ],
    "types": {
      "number": "integer",
      "published_at": "datetime",
      "updated_at": "datetime",
      "year": "integer"
    }
  },
  "schedule": "daily",
  "key_field": "id"
}

{
  "name": "UK Public General Acts",
  "url": "https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/data.feed?sort=published&results-count=50",
  "recipe": {
    "mode": "http",
    "format": "xml",
    "items": "entry",
    "fields": {
      "id": "id",
      "url": "link:not([rel])@href",
      "year": "ukm\\:Year@Value",
      "title": "title",
      "number": "ukm\\:Number@Value",
      "updated_at": "updated",
      "published_at": "published",
      "document_type": "ukm\\:DocumentMainType@Value"
    },
    "required": [
      "id",
      "title",
      "updated_at"
    ],
    "types": {
      "year": "integer",
      "number": "integer",
      "updated_at": "datetime",
      "published_at": "datetime"
    }
  },
  "key_field": "id",
  "schedule": "daily",
  "rights": true,
  "catalog": {
    "slug": "legislation-gov-uk-public-general-acts",
    "version_id": "37533ef2-88ae-4a5f-baa9-74b7d317ead5"
  }
}

# the Verified entry (fields, recipe, sample, terms) as JSON
curl https://sourcefinch.com/v1/catalog/legislation-gov-uk-public-general-acts -H "Authorization: Bearer $SOURCEFINCH_API_KEY"

# create the monitor from source.json (below)
curl -X POST https://sourcefinch.com/v1/sources \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SOURCEFINCH_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: $(uuidgen)" \
  -d @source.json

# then run it now (later runs follow the schedule)
curl -X POST https://sourcefinch.com/v1/sources/$SOURCE_ID/runs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SOURCEFINCH_API_KEY" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: $(uuidgen)"

sourcefinch login
sourcefinch catalog get legislation-gov-uk-public-general-acts --source-json > source.json
sourcefinch sources create --file source.json
sourcefinch runs create $SOURCE_ID --wait
sourcefinch records $SOURCE_ID

import { SourceFinch } from "@sourcefinch/sdk";

const sf = new SourceFinch({ apiKey: process.env.SOURCEFINCH_API_KEY });
const entry = await sf.catalog.get("legislation-gov-uk-public-general-acts");
const source = await sf.sources.create({
  catalog: { slug: entry.slug, version_id: entry.recipe.version_id },
  name: entry.name.slice(0, 100),
  url: entry.acquisition_path.endpoint,
  recipe: entry.recipe.definition,
  key_field: entry.recipe.key_field,
  schedule: entry.recipe.schedule,
  rights: true, // you confirm you have the right to collect this source
});
const run = await sf.runs.wait((await sf.runs.create(source.id)).id);
console.log(run.status);

claude mcp add --transport http sourcefinch https://sourcefinch.com/mcp

# then ask your agent:
"Use SourceFinch to monitor UK Public General Acts: get_catalog_source legislation-gov-uk-public-general-acts,
then create_source with its create_source_args (dry run first), then run_source."

Pricing

Each check is one run, whatever the number of records, and failed runs are free. On its default daily schedule this source uses about 30 runs a month, which fits the Free plan's 300 runs. It uses HTTP acquisition, so no browser runs are needed. See plans.

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