Non-Parliamentary publications are those produced by individual government departments and agencies. They include research reports, for example Attitudes to pensions: the 2006 Survey from the Department for Work and Pensions, technical information (e.g. the Department of the Environment Building regulations) and statistics (e.g. the National Census held every ten years).
Most new non-governmental publications are made available electronically. However, there is usually little commitment to preserving older information. As a result it is often easier to get hold of current information leaflets than to find policy documents from just a few years ago. In addition, whenever government departments are reorganized, merged or divided many online documents cease to be available on the new websites. It is therefore still necessary to know how to trace and locate printed material, even for quite recent publications.
It can be hard to guess from content and subject if an item might be Parliamentary (e.g. a House of Commons Paper) or non-Parliamentary. Further confusion arises when parts of an inquiry, for example the evidence, are published as non-Parliamentary, but the final report may be presented to Parliament and published as a Command Paper .
Typical items include:
Finding non-Parliamentary materials, both in print and online, differs from finding Parliamentary materials for exapmle there have not yet been any systematic attempts to digitise older documents. Prior to the launch of the UK Government WebArchive even 'born digital' documents from departmental web pages could be removed and/or web links would break. Best sources for finding non-Parliamentary publications include: