Equipping policy makers and researchers with AI-driven tools to explore legislation, analyse parliamentary developments, and empowering them in the policy making process.

The Challenges of Legislative Discovery Policy research and development is a cornerstone of effective government, shaping the frameworks that guide our society. Every day across the civil service, a huge amount of time is spent determining what policy currently exists, identifying how it needs to be changed, and planning how to implement those changes. With active legislation dating back to the 1200s, and over 600 pages worth of new parliamentary debate transcripts each day, there is a strong need for tools that can navigate through this volume of data and find insight. From researchers and legislators to parliamentarians and librarians, we have heard from teams across government are looking for help navigating the legislative landscape more efficiently.

Currently, the process for legislation discovery is tedious and difficult, relying heavily on subject matter experts who already know where to look and systematically search. These experts in legislation are brilliant, but rare and exceptionally constrained on time. To someone without years of experience it is almost impossible to find all of the relevant acts, amendments, revisions, and secondary legislation.

Introducing our suite of tools Working closely with legal and policy teams across government, the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) has developed a comprehensive suite of AI-powered tools designed to assist with legislative and policy research. Lex and Parlex is supported by an extensive knowledge database that includes parliamentary debates, bills, legislation, and case law. Both tools are designed to help in different aspects of the policy development lifecycle.

Lex: Simplifying Legislative Research Lex is designed to aid in legislative research. Through the Lexplorer interface, users can ask questions in everyday language like, "Tell me about legislation on flying drones near airports," and receive a detailed analysis and summary of the relevant laws, citing precise sections of the legislation. This tool eliminates the need for users to have prior knowledge of where to look or the specific terms or keywords used in the relevant pieces of legislation. Lex is powered by nine tools that help it search, summarise and understand the interconnections between legislation, case law, and explanatory notes. We have indexed a vector database of over 1.5 million sections of legislation and 63,000 cases to power the search behind these tools. Further tools help it structure and improve its research process via an adversarial mechanism. Lex uses its legal expertise to inform which of these tools are best to help it provide a detailed analysis and summary of the relevant laws to answer a user query.

Parlex: Forecasting Parliamentary Reactions Parlex allows users to forecast parliamentary reactions to proposed policies. By analysing years of parliamentary debate contributions from MPs and Peers, Parlex offers insights into how parliament might react to a new policy if it were debated tomorrow. This tool helps policy professionals gauge parliamentary sentiment towards specific issues, determining whether a policy will be well-received or face significant opposition. Using the Renters’ Rights Bill as an example, users are able to see which members of parliament have spoken about this topic in the past, and see a summary of their views, categorised by whether they are in favour or against the policy. This allows policy teams to understand the political climate and anticipate potential challenges or support for a policy before it is formally proposed and to build a parliamentary handling strategy.

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Together, Parlex and Lex empower policy teams to navigate the complex policy landscape more efficiently and effectively.

What's next? We have a lot to learn about the needs of policy teams and how we can best serve them. Lex is at a very early stage of development, so we are continuing to work with policy teams across government to refine the tools and understand how we can best serve our users. One of the most surprising things that we have learned is just how widespread the need for these tools is. We are helping to democratise policy research and development across government, and it has been encouraging to see the positive response from policy teams across government who have expressed the need for tools like this. If you would like to learn more, or would like to get involved, please get in touch!