About Hansard Social
Making 107 years of UK parliamentary debate searchable, browsable, and human.
What is Hansard Social?
Hansard Social is an independent website that transforms the official UK parliamentary record — Hansard — into a social-media style feed. Instead of wading through dense government archives, you can browse, search, and read parliamentary debates the way you'd scroll through a Twitter/X timeline.
Every speech, question, and response from the House of Commons from 1919 to today is indexed and searchable. You can find what MPs said about the Falklands War in 1982, search for every mention of the NHS across a century of debates, or simply browse what Parliament discussed on any given date.
The Archive in Numbers
Who is it for?
Hansard Social is built for anyone curious about how British politics actually works:
- Students and teachers — search for debates on any historical event or policy topic as a primary source for GCSE, A-Level, and university research
- Researchers and journalists — cross-reference what politicians said across decades on any issue
- Politically curious citizens — follow what your MP and others are actually saying in Parliament
- History enthusiasts — read how Parliament responded to the Suez Crisis, the miners' strike, or the 2008 financial crash in real time
Where does the data come from?
All parliamentary content on Hansard Social is sourced from the official UK Parliament Hansard record, which is published by Parliament under the Open Parliament Licence. This licence permits free reuse of parliamentary material for any purpose, including commercial use, provided the source is acknowledged.
MP profile data — names, constituencies, party affiliations, and parliamentary records — is sourced from publicly available parliamentary data, also published under open licences.
📜 Open Parliament Licence: Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0. Contains Parliamentary information. Source: UK Parliament (parliament.uk).
How does the search work?
Keyword search on Hansard Social uses a full-text search database built from all 5.5 million indexed speeches. Searches use porter stemming, which means searching for "tax" also finds "taxes" and "taxation", and searching for "hospital" finds "hospitals". Results are ranked chronologically and show an in-context snippet of the matching speech with the keyword highlighted.
Date range filters let you narrow results to a specific period — useful for research into historical events like searching for "Falklands" between 1982 and 1984, or "Brexit" between 2016 and 2020.
Is the site affiliated with Parliament or the Hansard Society?
No. Hansard Social is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to UK Parliament, the official Hansard publication, or the Hansard Society (a separate registered charity). The name "Hansard" in our title refers to the parliamentary record itself, not any organisation.
The live feed
In addition to the historical archive, Hansard Social features a live feed of recent parliamentary debates, updated regularly to reflect the latest proceedings in the House of Commons. The live feed presents debates in a threaded format, showing each speech as an individual post with the speaker's name, party, and constituency.
Feedback and contact
Hansard Social is an ongoing project. If you spot errors, have suggestions, or want to get in touch, please visit our Contact page.