Unlocked
January 8, 2014You will see that a kind commentator has given the link to the 2014 Finance Bill consultation documents which are here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/finance-bill-2014#consultation-on-draft-legislation
We’ll come back to that. For the moment, though, look at the address. It’s on the gov.uk site, right enough. It’s described as a consultation-on-draft-legislation. The “collections” part is interesting. Here. Let’s try an experiment. Open up another browser window, right now, and go to “gov.uk”. You should find yourself on a page headed “welcome to gov.uk”, yes? With a nice search box underneath it?
Now, in that search box, put “finance bill 2014”. I just did, and it returned three results:
- Finance Bill 2014 TIINs
- Finance Bill 2014: documents relating to Finance Bill 2014
- Finance Bill 2014 New Guidance
The three links given are, respectively,
- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/finance-bill-2014-tiins
- https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/finance-bill-2014
- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/finance-bill-2014-new-guidance-notes
And what do we notice? No sign of the “consultation-on-draft-legislation”.
You’d almost think they didn’t want us to know…
tiintax 
Unfortunately we just aren’t that sinister in GDS! I’m sorry you missed it but you were on the right page.
The second link you posted, which is to the document collection (the second link in gov uk search). Takes you to the consultation on draft legislation. Look again at that page, and on the left hand side, very near the top is a link to the draft legislation further down the page.
More generally, we aren’t 100% happy with how the autumn statement was presented on GOV.UK, in short it doesn’t quite meet the user needs that you share with many other tax professionals. We are working on improvements now with HMRC and HMT and you should see some changes, not least before the Budget. We’ll be blogging more about this on the transition blog: http://hmrctransition.blog.gov.uk
Kind regards,
Stephen Edwards
Product Manager – HMRC transition
Government Digital Service