19 Facts About Hansard

Hansard is the traditional name of the transcripts of parliamentary debates in Britain and many Commonwealth countries.

Hansard released the man, but was ordered to appear before the House to explain his actions.

The Court argued that Thomas Curson Hansard, who had "seen the copy before it was printed, ought not to have suffered it to have been printed at all" and was sentenced to three months imprisonment in the King's Bench Prison.

Cobbett and Hansard did not ever employ anyone to take down notes of the debates, which were taken from a multiplicity of sources in the morning newspapers.

Hansard outlasted competitors including Almon and Debrett, and the later Mirror of Parliament published by J H Barrow from 1828 to 1843; Barrow's work was more comprehensive but he checked each speech with the Member and allowed them to correct anything they wished they had not said.

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Hansard is not a word-for-word transcript of debates in Parliament.

Also, Hansard sometimes adds extraneous material to make the remarks less ambiguous.

Hansard publishes written answers – known as written ministerial statements – made by government ministers in response to questions formally posed by members.

On publication of a reprint, Stockdale sued again but Hansard was ordered by the House to plead that he had acted under order of the Commons and was protected by parliamentary privilege.

The UK Hansard is currently being digitised to a high-level format for on-line publication.

Hansard is treated as accurate, there is a parliamentary convention whereby if a member of Parliament makes an inaccurate statement in Parliament, they must write a correction in the copy of Hansard kept in the House of Commons library.

In 2010 historic copies of Hansard were sent to India in its original volume format and was transformed from the original bound versions into plain text by optical character recognition and put on the Internet to enable easy research.

In July 2018 this digitised Hansard was vastly improved and merged with the rest of Hansard as previously it was available under two websites and now it is a single website.

Canadian Hansard records make note of the language used by the members of parliament, so as not to misinterpret the words of the person who has the floor.

In Tasmania, Hansard was not introduced until 1979, commencing on 6 June for the Legislative Council and 12 June for the House of Assembly.

Today the New Zealand Hansard is produced by a team of 17 FTE Hansard Editors within the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives.

Hansard is published on the New Zealand Parliament website each day the House sits, and later indexed bound volumes are produced.

Hansard Editors follow strict rules on what changes they can make to the words members use in the chamber.

Hansard is as close to verbatim as possible, although Hansard Editors remove repetitions and redundancies and make minor grammatical corrections.