Drafting NI Bills
NI Bills supported by Lawmaker
Lawmaker has been set up to allow users to create NI Bill projects of the following sub-types:
Executive Bill
Budget Bill
Private Member’s Bill
Assembly Committee Bill, and
Assembly Commission Bill.
The different sub-types drive the pre-populated rubric that appear on the front and back pages of the bill, and in future can be used by the NIA website (when it is integrated with Lawmaker’s API) to categorise the bills e.g. executive and non-executive bills.
By the time they are enacted, they will all be published as “Acts of the Northern Ireland Assembly”.
Private, Hybrid and Consolidation Bills
At the time of writing, there hadn’t been any NI private, hybrid or consolidation bills so there were no document templates to base them on.
This decision was not to spend development resource on configuring these bill sub-types and this was based on 2 key assumptions:
Private, Hybrid and Consolidation Bills aren’t expected to differ significantly from the existing bill template used for public bills. If there were rubric differences, the content on the front and back covers are all editable so the wording can be adjusted if required based on these new types of bills.
Private, Hybrid and Consolidation bills will be classified as “Acts of the Northern Ireland Assembly” which is what NI public bills are classified as when enacted. This follows the same pattern as Scotland, who use the same act classification (ASPs) for their private and hybrid bills when enacted. Based on this assumption, it would not be necessary to change the enactment process in Lawmaker for these bill types.
The advice is, if they crop up in future, to draft them as a ‘normal’ bill (selecting the most appropriate sub-type which drives the rubric that appear by default on the front and back covers). The content on the front and back covers can be tweaked as required. When they are enacted, they can follow the same process for enacting public bills in Lawmaker and shared with the National Archives via the publishing portal.
Consolidation bills differ slightly from ‘normal’ bills in that they come with Tables of Origins and Destinations. These can be inserted into NI Bills if required. See Generating Tables of Origins and Destinations for more information.