Hansard is the official report of Parliament. It is a ‘substantially verbatim’ report of what Members have said, with repetitions and obvious mistakes removed.

Hansard also reports decisions taken during a sitting and records how Members voted to reach those decisions in Divisions.

Each House of Parliament has its own publications.

House of Commons Hansard includes:

• proceedings in the Commons Chamber
• proceedings in Westminster Hall
• written ministerial statements
• petitions
• corrections from Ministers and Members.

House of Commons Hansard produces separate reports of proceedings in Commons General and Public Bill Committees.

House of Lords Hansard includes:

• proceedings in the Lords Chamber
• proceedings in Grand Committee.

Both House of Commons and House of Lords Hansard also produce the transcripts of Select Committees’ evidence-taking sittings. These transcripts are published on each committee’s page on the Committees website.

You can browse Hansard records by sitting, debate, division, and Member.

Sometimes, Members are marked as ‘Independent’ (usually abbreviated to ‘Ind’). This includes MPs elected as Independent candidates. It also includes MPs who no longer ‘have the party whip’. This means these MPs have been removed from their political party in Parliament.

On any day when either Chamber is sitting, the ‘rolling’ version of Hansard is published in instalments. This means you should be able to see what a Member has said within three hours of them saying it.

The full record (the ‘daily part’) of Hansard is published the next morning. This adds sharing options and column numbers (in line with the printed document).

On Hansard, you can access records of debates from as far back as the early 19th century.

We added most records from before 2010 by scanning physical copies of bound volumes. This means there may be some errors in the text.

We have also published written answers up to 2010. Written answers from between 2010 and 2014 may be available on our legacy site. Hansard stopped publishing written answers in October 2014.

At the moment it is not possible to search historical content by Member, or view a Member’s contributions on an individual page.

In the future, we aim to include a historical Member database and link Hansard text with video.