How to search Hansard and MPs

The Parliament desk

The Parliament page is the Westminster record on this index. Current MPs and peers, the registers on the member, Commons speeches, and written questions. It is not a set of committee packs. House of Commons committee PDFs are not what this page counts as papers.

Member lists can be filtered, including former members. That query stays on the public page. Page through the lists on the desk. The canonical address of the page is still /parliament. A query string does not make a second site.

Written questions can be filtered by house. Commons and Lords questions are both on the questions page. Speeches are on Hansard. Those are separate pages so a speech is not presented as a question.

What Hansard holds here

Commons speeches on this index run from 10 July 2024. That is the chain we hold, not the whole historic record of Parliament, and not a crawl of the Hansard website. Each speech links to its debate. Lords debates are not held.

A speech is what was said in the chamber chain we store. It is not a committee minute, not a bill paper, and not the register of interests. The register sits on the member. Interests are entries on that member, not a pile of 5,000 rows printed as if they were one table on the desk.

If you need a committee pack from a department or a council, that file is on the body that published it. Parliament is the members, the speeches, the questions, and the registers. Council minutes are a different library.

A worked example

Open /parliament. Read the count of current MPs and current peers. Open a member from the list if you are signed in. Logged out, the desk itself is public: the counts, the lists as the page shows them, and the links to speeches and questions.

Open /hansard for the speech index. The description on that page repeats the 10 July 2024 start. Open /questions and filter by house if you want one chamber. A question names the house. A speech does not become a question because the same member spoke.

Donations and lobbying returns are not on this desk. They are on the Electoral page. The Commons register of interests stays on the member. Electoral records is the other half of that distinction.

What this is not

When you cite a speech, name the member, the date, and the debate. When you cite a question, name the house. When you cite the register, name the member and that it is the register, not Hansard. Those three citations are easy to swap in a notebook and hard to unwind later. The pages are split so the citation can stay precise.

Former members stay on the public desk when you ask for them. That list is still Parliament. It is not a private archive. Paging through members does not ask you to sign in. Sign-in is for the text of papers elsewhere, and for the tools that keep a reading list. The public desk is enough to see who is a current member, to open the speech index, and to open written questions. Use it that way. Do not describe the desk as if it contained the bill papers, the votes, or the committee corridor. Those are other publications of Parliament. When they are not on this page, say they are not on this page. A reader who needs a select committee report should go to Parliament's own site for that report, then come back here for the member, the speech, and the question. Keeping those errands separate is what makes a citation checkable the next morning. If a speech and a question share a date, they are still two records. Write both dates. Write both houses if a question is Lords and the speech is Commons. The filter on the questions page is there so you do not have to do that sorting by eye. Use it, then cite the row, not the filter.

It is not Lords debates. It is not every past parliament. It is not committee packs from the House. It is not a finding about a member. Cite the speech, the question, or the register entry.

A seat on the site, meaning a signed-in account, is what opens full text elsewhere. The word seat on a member page means a constituency or a place in the House. Public roles keeps those meanings apart.