gb-eli-mcp

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.matematicsolutions/gb-eli-mcp -->

An MCP server for legislation.gov.uk, The National Archives' official portal for United Kingdom legislation. It searches and retrieves Acts of Parliament, UK Statutory Instruments, and the equivalent instruments of the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly, with persistent identifiers and verifiable citations.

Part of the MateMatic eu-legal-mcp production line: the UK counterpart of the Polish sejm-eli-mcp and the German de-eli-mcp, built on the same architecture and citation contract against the UK's own source.

No native ELI. legislation.gov.uk does not publish a native /eli/ namespace (confirmed live: GET /eli/ukpga/2018/12 returns 404), even though its own persistent-identifier scheme predates and is closely related to ELI - the UK is widely credited with pioneering the URI-based legislation-identifier concept that ELI later formalised EU-wide. eli_uri therefore carries the UK's own stable id URI (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/{type}/{year}/{number}) instead of a fabricated ELI path - the same disclosure pattern used by this factory's nl-eli-mcp and se-eli-mcp. See CONSTITUTION.md Art. 4.

Licence. Content is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (confirmed live from the site's own /help page), which permits copying, publishing and adapting with attribution. This connector only relays that public content, with a source_url on every response.

The six tools

Tool	What it does
gb_search	Search legislation by text, doc type and year (/all/data.feed or /{doc_type}/data.feed).
gb_get_act	Fetch act/instrument metadata by reference (e.g. ukpga/2018/12).
gb_get_text	Fetch the full text (xml, html, akn/Akoma Ntoso, rdf, pdf, csv).
gb_recent_legislation	Legislation published since a date, newest-first, optionally by doc type.
gb_search_case_law	Search UK judgments via The National Archives' Find Case Law Atom feed, by text, court, and date range.
gb_get_case	Fetch a judgment by neutral citation, Find Case Law URI/path, or opaque id - returns Akoma Ntoso XML, or a PDF link fallback.

Every response carries the contract: eli_uri (e.g. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/ukpga/2018/12), human_readable_citation (e.g. Data Protection Act 2018 c. 12), and source_url. Case-law responses carry the same-spirit contract (human_readable_citation, source_url, dataset_note) - see CONSTITUTION.md Art. 5.

Install

cd gb-eli-mcp
pip install -e .

Configure (Claude Code / any MCP client)

Copy .mcp.json.example and adjust if needed:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gb-eli-mcp": { "command": "gb-eli-mcp" }
  }
}

Environment:

• GB_ELI_BASE_URL - default https://www.legislation.gov.uk
• GB_ELI_CACHE_DIR - default ~/.matematic/cache/gb-eli
• GB_ELI_AUDIT_DIR - default ~/.matematic/audit

No API key. legislation.gov.uk is keyless.

Governance

• Public data only - read-only against legislation.gov.uk; no client data leaves the machine beyond search parameters.
• Audit log - every tool call appends one JSON line to ~/.matematic/audit/gb-eli-mcp.jsonl.
• Vendor-neutral - the server talks only to legislation.gov.uk and the local filesystem; no LLM provider, no telemetry.
• Verifiable citations - every response is independently checkable via source_url.

See CONSTITUTION.md (the binding rules) and DISCOVERY.md (the live API probe).

Tests

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/test_instructions_drift.py -v   # offline
pytest tests/test_citations_case_law.py -v   # offline
pytest tests/test_smoke.py -v                # hits live legislation.gov.uk
pytest tests/test_smoke_case_law.py -v       # hits live caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk

Licence

Apache-2.0. (c) Matematic Solutions / Wieslaw Mazur.

Note: the code in this repository is Apache-2.0. The legislation content fetched at runtime from legislation.gov.uk remains Crown copyright, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 - not relicensed by this project.