[Commons/Lords] Cannot update an amendment after Consolidated List has been published
The Commons reported an issue in LMS-929 whereby the PPU were unable to update a Report Stage amendment with its outcome in order to generate a Proceedings.
After further investigation, it appeared the Report Stage amendment had been mistakenly copied into the Consolidated List rather than using the ‘Ping Pong’ version of the amendment. The Consolidated List had since been published by the Lords which meant that the House of Lords now had this amendment locked to them as ownership of all the amendments in that list pass to the House that publishes the list. It only affected this single amendment in the list as it was an unexpected amendment that was agreed last minute, after the candidate Consolidated List had been generated and shared with OPC for review. The quickest way to get this extra amendment into the Consolidated List was just to copy and paste it into the correct location. Unfortunately, in this case, the wrong version of the amendment had been copied.
How to fix this whilst maintaining downstream data on Parliament’s website
Amendments that move through to Ping Pong are not republished on the website in HTML format - only the motions to these amendments are published in HTML format. This meant that the safest thing to do would be to replace the amendment on the Consolidated List of Amendments so that the Commons could get back control of the original Report Stage version and update it so that these updates could peculate through to the website and update the same amendment on Parliament’s website with its outcome.
To do this, log on as a user from the House that published the Consolidated List.
Follow these steps to create a copied version of the Report Stage amendment, ready to copy into the Consolidated List:
Find the amendment on the Amendment Manager under the appropriate bill version filter
Select it using the check box and select Amendment Actions > Move/copy to a different stage
Select ‘Ping Pong’ stage and you can leave it pointing to the bill version that the amendment was amending - bill version in this context is not that important. This will create a copy of the Report Stage amendment that has been stripped of its events, no longer has a proposer and no longer has an assigned number.
Duplicate the published of the Consolidated List so that you can open it to edit it:
Open the duplicated list in the Editor
Select the the Report Stage amendment and delete it (this only removes it from the list, it won’t delete the amendment)
Select the amendment on Amendment Manager and use Amendment Actions > Create temporary list to open it in the Editor
Select the whole amendment and use copy (Ctrl+C)
Place your cursor in the Consolidated list at the point where you want the amendment pasted after and use paste (Ctrl+V). The Proposer and explanatory statement information will automatically be suppressed in the Consolidated List so you won’t see them even if they existed in the temporary list.
Save your revised Consolidated List
Generate a PDF and republish this Consolidated List. The only reason you need to republish the edited Consolidated List is to make sure the person who is responsible for producing the revised Consolidated List to send back to the other House is using the most up to date version.
Lastly, and most important: notify the National Archives using the support portal and ask them to switch permissions on the Report Stage amendment so that the House that needs to access it can. Please use the ‘Report an urgent system issue’ so that TNA know to get this actioned by their supplier (who are based in Australia) overnight. There is an alternative way to get permissions back to the other House if you can’t wait a day:
As a user in the House that doesn’t have permission to edit the amendment, Duplicate the published version of the Consolidated List
Delete all the amendments from it apart from the one you want to get permissions for
Save, PDF and publish the Consolidated List containing this single amendment. Publishing the list will move ownership of the amendments to the House that published the list. You will be able to edit the amendment now.
MAKE SURE YOU WORK TOGETHER WITH THE OTHER HOUSE IN THIS PROCESS SO THAT EVERYONE IS AWARE OF THE ISSUE AND THE STEPS TO RESOLVE THEM ARE CONTROLLED.
Future improvement
In future, a new Document Check warning will be added to check that all amendments in a Consolidated List are correctly assigned to ‘Ping Pong'. If any amendment was not at ping pong stage, a warning would be displayed and this would have been triggered in this particular circumstance.