Sessional Papers

• The parliamentary papers of the House of Commons, also called the Sessional Papers or "Blue Books", began in 1801.
• Not every Sessional paper gets printed.
• The Journals between 1541 and 1730 have reports of the committees or government department and are indexed under the headings "printing" and "reports of the Committees".
• Prior to 1833 Command Papers were usually printed in the Journal of the House of Commons.
• Prior to 1921 almost all important government documents were presented to parliament by Royal Commissions or government departments. Beginning in 1921 only documents that pertained to pending legislation were presented.
• Sessional papers include bills (public and private); reports (of Commissioners and Committees); and accounts and papers and command papers (non-Parliamentary papers printed "by command").
• The indexes to the Sessional papers provide you with a citation to help you locate the document consisting of
  • a sessional year(s) (usually overlapping).
  • Next in parenthesis a number which is printed at the bottom left hand corner of the title page of the report within the physical volume.
  • Then comes a Roman numeral, which indicates the specific volume within the set and last is a page number indicating the page on which the report would start if the volume were continuously paged (which they are not).
  • An example is 1912/13 (214) I. 722
• Command Papers are presented to both the House of Lords and the House of Commons but only printed in the House of Commons Sessional Papers.
• All papers except the Command Papers (also known as the white or green papers) begin with a new series of numbers for each session. See below for Command Paper numbering.