LEGISLATION PLATFORM CONTRACT · UK public procurement notice

The purpose of this procurement process is for The National Archives (TNA) to select a Supplier to maintain, and develop its Legislation Platform.

The intention is to award the Contract for an initial period of 2 years, with options to extend for three further periods of up to twelve months each (2+1+1+1).

The Invitation to Tender document gives an overview of the Platform requirements and should be read in conjunction with Annexes 1-7, which set out in more detail the various components of the legislation.gov.uk Platform. Annexes 1-7 are available on request. If you require access to them, please contact us at procurement@nationalarchives.gov.uk

We estimate the maximum contract value over the whole contract term (i.e. 5 years) to be circa £10,200,000 (inc. VAT).

The availability of freely accessible, up to date legislation in print and online underpins the rule of law in the UK. It is at the heart of the business of government, vital to our democratic society and drives economic activity.

Most new legislation starts with a drafting team based in a government department. In the case of primary legislation, the legislative process involves a Bill (a proposed Act), initially drafted by the Government (or an individual MP in the case of Private Members Bills) which passes through various stages in the relevant Parliament, Assembly or Senedd, undergoing a range of amendments until the final version is agreed, passed, and receives Royal Assent.

Secondary legislation is made under powers created under primary legislation, for example granting a particular Secretary of State the authority to create regulations in relation to a specific area of law. Secondary legislation mainly comes in the form of Statutory Instruments, and is mainly drafted by lawyers within Government departments.

The National Archives, in its capacity as the King's Printer of Acts of Parliament, the King's Printer for Scotland, the King's Printer for Wales, and the Government Printer for Northern Ireland, has statutory obligations to register, publish, and make available in print, legislation produced by the UK and Scottish Parliaments, the Welsh Senedd, the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the Governments of the four nations. The legislation.gov.uk Platform enables The National Archives to deliver statutory and service responsibilities.

The National Archives gives strategic leadership to the services, operates the governance framework and provides legislative, policy, publishing and editorial expertise. It also provides technical direction in relation to the architectural approach and standards to be adopted by the Platform Supplier.

The legislation services to be provided by the Platform Supplier involve maintaining and developing the legislation.gov.uk Platform consisting of:

• the legislation.gov.uk website (www.legislation.gov.uk ↗) which provides public access to legislation, both as originally enacted and in a revised form, and provides open data through an API for data users to include in their own products and services. It also includes a Beta linked data service that provides metadata about legislation that is directly accessible to the public and which is driving website functionality;
• Statistics.legislation.gov.uk, a service for The National Archives and the Supplier that processes website usage logs to allow analysis of website traffic for performance and user research monitoring.
• legislation.gov.uk Publishing (publishing.legislation.gov.uk ↗) used by people working for other government departments to register statutory instruments and associated documents and to manage the publication of all primary and secondary legislation from all UK Parliaments, Governments and Assemblies;
• legislation.gov.uk Editorial (editorial.legislation.gov.uk ↗) used to edit and update legislation by our in-house team;
• legislation.gov.uk Research (research.legislation.gov.uk ↗) for academics, policy makers and researchers, which provides downloadable bulk data and a range of easy-to-use tools that enable research across the entire statute book.
• the legislation.gov.uk Linked Data Service an RDF Linked Data Store that holds metadata relating to legislation, that facilitates sharing of information between internal legislation systems as well as driving services on the main legislation website and providing direct public access to data through the Linked Data API and public SPARQL endpoint.

The Platform Supplier is also responsible for providing Cloud hosting management services. The legislation.gov.uk platform is hosted in the Cloud within AWS, largely following an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach. It is hosted across dedicated Live, QA, UAT and DR environments - scaled down replicas of the live environment are used for testing, development and staging. Infrastructure is provisioned and managed using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) through AWS CloudFormation and EC2 Image Builder, while application deployments are managed through Jenkins and CodeDeploy. The platform relies heavily on EC2 and makes extensive use of AWS services including S3, CloudFront, ELB, VPC, Athena, Shield, GuardDuty and others.

The Supplier must manage, secure, monitor and continually optimise the infrastructure to ensure that it meets performance, resilience, security and cost requirements.