What's new in version 20.0?

Version 20 is a significant release which includes several new features and improvements, together with some bug fixes.

It was released on 28 July 2025.

New features, improvements and changes

Improved support for creating numbered and unnumbered lists

Version 20.0 includes enhanced options to support the creation of numbered or unnumbered lists of items (distinct from the numbered provisions which constitute the bulk of your legislative document). Lists are especially likely to appear inside table cells and in schedules to Statutory Instruments.

Version 20.0 introduces a more flexible ‘List’ option in the CCA, which will allow you to create numbered and unnumbered lists in any provision of your document and inside table cells.

The main features of this new list functionality are as follows:

• When inserting a list, you will have the option to choose from one of several lists styles, with different numbering options (as well as the option to show no numbering, bullet points, or em-dashes against each item);

• The same ‘list’ option can be used to create lower-level nested lists within an existing list;

• Lawmaker’s renumbering functionality will take account of the numbering style selected for a given list and intelligently renumber items in the list (depending on your auto-renumbering setting);

• List items can be promoted or demoted in a similar way to normal provisions, allowing you to manage the relative indentation of list items and nested list items.

The new list functionality can be used to create structured content inside table cells and within an SI Explanatory Note. It is also available within standard provisions in the body and schedules but should only be used there where the standard provision types (e.g. subsection (1), paragraph (a), etc.) would not produce the required result.

Create Act versions of Bills and Create Made versions of SIs

The existing functions to create Act versions of Bills and Made versions of Draft SIs have been moved to dedicated Action menu entries on the project tab, “Create Act version” and “Create ‘to be made’ version”.

For SI and SSIs, see the following user manual page Converting a Draft SI/SSI into a Made version.

For UK Bills, see Converting a UK Bill into an Act.

For Scottish Bills, see Converting a Scottish Bill into an Act.

For NI Bills, see Converting an NI Bill to an Act.

Northern Ireland Minutes of Proceedings

Northern Ireland Bill Office users will now be able to generate a Minutes of Proceedings to share with their Business Office team, listing the outcomes of all amendments.

See Generating the NI Minutes of Proceedings

Exporting Northern Ireland Bills and amendment lists to Microsoft Word

Users can now export NI Bills and Amendments to Word which, amongst other uses, will allow users to view comments in bubbles. This is a beta feature that will be extended to other jurisdictions in coming releases.

See Exporting NI Bills and Amendments to Word.

Delete and restore amendments

You can now manually delete draft amendments from the Amendment Manager. Once deleted, the amendments will not by default be visible in the Amendment manager but they can be restored if you later change your mind, or if an amendment was deleted by mistake.

See Deleting, viewing and restoring deleted amendments.

Relevant interest markers

Users in the Commons & Northern Ireland will now be able to assign relevant interest markers to Members appearing as proposers or supporters in amendment lists as required. This data is captured as an attribute against the Member for the particular amendment, making it reusable by downstream applications (e.g. Parliament websites) as required.

See Marking members with relevant interests.

Inline amendments to tables

Users can now create amendments to tables in bills using the Inline LoDA feature. The generated traditional wording of amendments created in an in Inline LoDA will include the correct page, line, and column references.

The following amendment types are supported:

• amendments which leave out, insert, or substitute words within a table cell;

• amendments which leave out, insert, or substitute single rows within a table;

• amendments which leave our or substitute whole lines within a table cell.

There are several known limitations which will be fixed in a future release:

• it’s not currently possible to insert more than one new row, or select more than one existing row to leave out or substitute

• due to some of the changes to list mark-up (see above), including lists inside table cells, some inline amendments to list content inside table cells won’t generate a traditional amendment which includes the column number.

Both issues will be fixed in an upcoming release.

Commons amendment lists - white star logic for past-midnight publishing

When Lawmaker assigns white stars to amendments on a user-specified date, any amendments which were first published between midnight and 8 a.m. on the following calendar day will now be treated as having been published on the preceding day, and will be assigned white stars too. Amendments first published between midnight and 8 a.m. on the user-specified date will be treated as having been published the day before, and won’t be assigned white stars. (This change is intended to cater for past-midnight publishing of amendment lists.)

Commons amendment lists - improved pagination of supporter lists in PDF

When an amendment has 21 or more supporters, the full list of supporters is now allowed to break over the end of a page in the generated PDF. (Previously, where the list of supporters could not fit in the space at the end of a page, Lawmaker would move the full list of supporters and the amendment text onto the following page in the PDF, leaving a white space at the bottom of the page.)

Consolidation Bills - origins and destinations

Version 20.0 makes several improvements to the functionality originally released in version 19.0 to support the drafting and management of consolidation bills. The following changes have been implemented in this release:

• Edit portion mode: It’s now possible to open the Table of Origins and Table of Destinations attachments separately from the rest of the bill using ‘Edit Portion’ mode, and within Edit Portion mode you can choose to generate or regenerate the Origins and the Destinations tables.

• Generate a single destinations table: You can now generate or re-generate a single table of Destinations for one of the referenced enactments. (It is still possible to generate or re-generate the destination tables for all referenced enactments.)

• Auto-generation of the abbreviations table for the Table of Destinations: The table of abbreviations at the beginning of the Table of Destinations is now generated automatically, based on the list of abbreviations which appear at the beginning of the Table of Origins.

• XML refinements: When a version of a consolidation bill is published by a parliamentary user, this published version now contains the correct XML content, allowing the bill to be managed through its subsequent amending stages.

• Update references: The existing ‘update references’ feature can now be used within a Table of Destinations in order to update all internal references in those tables, where the bill has been renumbered but no new origin/destination information has been added.

• Other functionality required for producing versions of the bill for consideration in Parliament has been added:

  • When inserting the back cover on a consolidation bill, this is now inserted in the correct place, before the tables of origins and destinations.

  • It’s now possible to create additional paragraphs at the start of the Table of Origins and Table of Destinations attachments; this functionality can be used to add notes to those documents.

• We have made some minor improvements to the generated PDFs for the Table of Origins and Table of Destinations.

See Generating Tables of Origins and Destinations.

Generate Bill HTML

Lawmaker now offers an HTML export available via the API as a new manifestation type and also includes it in the downloaded ZIP file for bills. It is a beta feature where well-structured, accessible HTML is produced (with associated CSS available separately) for reuse by other systems.

Bug fixes