"All(?) current UK legislation" this would include all UK legislation of general applicability, but would omit other enactments such as "private" (e.g. granting immigration status to a particular person) and "special" legislation including but not limited to budget bills of limited temporal applicability which are not generally codified (hence "public" "general" acts).

What does it mean for them to be “codified”? And how is a grant of immigration status to a particular person legislation in any sense? Do you mean like in some kind of special cases wherein Parliament takes it upon itself to grant someone special leave by passing an Act to do so rather than going through the normal application process and channels where it is processed by immigration officers?

@ohwilleke: I'm wondering if your comment is based on US practice, as AFAICT it doesn't sound applicable to the UK. To use your examples: (1) decisions like that affecting individuals don't nowadays require legislation, so won't appear on legislation.gov.uk. That wasn't always true in the past, and personal acts existed for that purpose - but apparently none have been passed since 1987.

@ohwilleke: (2) All money-related Acts are published immediately, just like any other Act. However, it's not unusual for "spent" Acts to be repealed by a later Act. Nonetheless, they remain on the website, marked as repealed. Having said that, there are budget resolutions which have temporary effect, agreed by the Commons as part of the budget process (and they appear on the Parliament website). However, the contents of those resolutions must still end up in an Act, so they end up getting published as legislation eventually.

@Rick: note that Acts that were wholly repealed before 1991 don't appear on the site, so there's no way of telling how many of those there were.

@JosephP Just so. Another major category of private acts before the UK passed a general judicially administered divorce law, was that all divorces were issued via private acts. Similarly, before the UK passed a law authorizing companies to be formed via an administrative process, all new companies with limited liability arose by virtue of private acts (e.g. the East India Company).

@SteveMelnikoff I am referring to the historical UK parliamentary process which the US copied. I don't know the extent to which it is still utilized but if you are looking at all acts passed since the beginning of time (or the dawn of the parliamentary era anyway) you need to include them an divorces, company formation, immigration law exceptions, and bills of attainder at one point or another in UK legislative history were all private acts that were commonly adopted in this fashion.

Okay so are private acts in essence bespoke acts that pertain only to a certain person or entity rather than general applicability but are still passed by sessions of the same sitting parliamentary houses as general acts and are just as accessible to the general public in their content?

@ohwilleke what did you mean by just so? That my proposed description of how immigration status by Parliamentary Act might function was in fact how it is?

@JosephP. What ohwilleke was referring to are called personal acts in the UK - and there haven't been any new ones since 1987. Records of them were apparently always patchy. I suspect that they are not especially relevant to your question.

Yes but they still quite interesting, nonetheless.

@ohwilleke Fair enough. It sounds like records of personal acts were patchy at best - and they appear to be essentially obsolete now anyway. Private acts (which apply to companies, though in limited circumstances) and local acts (which apply to local government) do still exist, and are published alongside all other Acts of Parliament.

@JosephP. As an aside, there is the concept of a "spent" act (or part of an act), which is typically one which makes a one-time authorisation of an action - like marriages in the past; and more typically these days, authorisation for government spending. Once these authorisations pass into law and the authorised action has been implemented, the act has served its purpose. Such acts are repealed from time to time as a tidying-up measure. I'm not aware that personal acts are included - but they could be. My point is: for the purposes of this question, we can probably ignore personal acts. :-)

@SteveMelnikoff I have no wish to stiffle creative thought, especially as this thread may be interesting to the participants, but I get a rather distracting "ping" notification every time a new comment is added. As I'm not privy to the conversation I don't have the option of "move to chat" so I've flagged a request to the Mods to move it for me. I trust this is satisfactory.

@JosephP I have no wish to stiffle creative thought, especially as this thread may be interesting to the participants, but I get a rather distracting "ping" notification every time a new comment is added. As I'm not privy to the conversation I don't have the option of "move to chat" so I've flagged a request to the Mods to move it for me. I trust this is satisfactory.

Tidying up measures… this gets at just the heart of my question. What namespace or repository or other space is it that’s being “tidied up” what is the state of an Act that is in effect called and how many of these are there?

@Rick Entirely sensible. :-)

@JosephP. The first line of Rick's answer already states that: legislation.gov.uk is an official store of UK legislation. It's a database rather than a list, but it records all legislation - from all legislative sources - that is in force somewhere in the UK. Legislation wholly repealed before 1991 is not listed there. It also records all changes to legislation since that date.