Inline amendments

Lawmaker enables you create parliamentary amendments by editing the existing version of the Bill instead of drafting them as “traditional” amendments. In Lawmaker, this is called “inline amending”.

The process is similar to make changes to document in tracked changes mode.

Lawmaker can then automatically generate versions of the amendments in the traditional form which can be submitted and managed in the same way as amendments that were drafted from the outset in the traditional form.

In this Section

Working with inline amendments

When creating your inline amendment document, you will be able to specify a proposer which will be applied to all inline amendments in that document.  You can update the proposer and supporter information in an inline document which will update all amendments in that document.  Alternatively you can choose to update individual amendment's proposers and/or supporters when viewing the traditional form of the inline amendments.

Using the "Inline Amendments" summary panel, you can navigate between the inline amendments, choosing to view or remove amendments from that document.  

For larger bills, it is also possible to open portions of the inline document, allowing you to create inline amendments against specific provisions which will help with performance issues. 

Types of amendments currently handled

For the first iteration of inline amendments, we've focused on the 3 main types of amendment:

• Insert (including inserting new clauses/sections and schedules)

• Leave out, and

• Substitute (e.g. leave out X and insert Y).

Converting inline amendments to traditional amendments

As soon as an inline amendment has been saved, it can be viewed in traditional form and is available on the 'Amendment Manager' tab.  The traditional amendments that are generated will include proposer and supporter info, Dnumbers and any other relevant metadata (e.g. Ids and location attributes) equivalent to what the amendment would have if drafted as a traditional amendment.  Inline-derived amendments can be edited in traditional form.  This will set a warning marker against the equivalent inline amendment which lets you know that the traditional form of the inline amendment has been updated and prevents you from editing it.  Markers can be manually removed from the inline amendment if you did want to overwrite the changes made to the traditionally formatted amendment.  

Managing traditional amendments generated from inline amendments

Amendments generated from an inline document can be handled in exactly the same way as a traditionally generated amendment once they appear on the 'Amendment Manager' tab.  They can be submitted, tabled, set to 'On hold' etc.;  and they will be included in the official lists as part of the list generation process.

What is planned for future iterations

The inline amending (and auto-application of amendments) features will be extended to cover the following types of amendments in future iterations:

• Amendments to content within tables

• Amendments to divide and move/transpose provisions

• Amendments to the preamble and long title in UK Bills

Some less common forms of wording in traditional amendments, such as amendments that include the phrase "to end of clause" or "to end of subsection". haven't been catered for yet and will be tackled in future versions.

We will also continue to refine how inline amendments behave to make the process more robust while keeping it flexible. Feedback on edge cases that aren't correctly handled at the moment  will be essential to refine future iterations and should be directed to the Lawmaker support email address.