Controller’s Library

Overview

The Controller’s Library was the archive of HM Stationery Office (HMSO), the former printer for the UK Government.

Between 2021 and 2023, The National Archives digitised thousands of volumes of legislation from the Controller’s Library, as well as some volumes printed by HMSO’s successor The Stationery Office. We are now making these volumes available to view on legislation.gov.uk, and adding over 35,000 items of legislation from within them to the website.

This collection includes:

• All UK Statutory Instruments of a general character made between 1948 and 1990, as well as many local UK Statutory Instruments;
• A number of local Statutory Instruments made between 1991 and 2002 that were not previously available on legislation.gov.uk;
• A large number of Public, Local and Private Acts enacted between the 13th and 20th centuries that were not previously available on legislation.gov.uk, or only available online as a revised version.

We will upload these legislation items to the website as individual PDFs throughout 2023 and 2024. Where possible, we have processed each PDF using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to detect the text within it, so you can select and copy text within the PDF as well as search for text inside it.

We will also upload the original bound volume PDFs in full colour. These PDFs will also contain embedded text from the OCR process where available.

Limitations

The Controller’s Library is not a complete collection of legislation. The collection only contains:

• UK Public General Acts, Local Acts and Private Acts;
• Public, Local and Private Acts of the Parliament of Great Britain;
• Some Acts of the Parliaments of England;
• UK Statutory Instruments;
• Some NI Orders in Council.

Additionally, some items of the above types are missing from the collection. For a given item, this may be because:

• The volume containing the item was not held within the Controller’s Library or was not in a suitable condition for scanning;
• The item was removed from its volume or box to be scanned onto microfilm and was not returned to the Controller’s Library;
• The item was not printed and made available for sale, so it was never archived in the Controller’s Library.