Digital & IT Opportunities at The National Archives

Join us on 25 July 2025 from 10am- 2pm at The National Archives to find out about our digital procurement opportunities, meet the digital service teams, and to learn about the skills and expertise we're looking for to help us deliver our world-leading digital services.

There will be coffee on arrival, formal presentations, lunch and breakout sessions where you can informally chat to representatives of the digital services provided by The National Archives.

You can join the formal presentations online if you cannot attend in person - just let us know.

Find out about the following services in particular:

Lawmaker

Lawmaker is a service enabling users to draft and manage secondary and primary legislation (including the parliamentary amendment process). It is XML-based and accessed via the browser.

Lawmaker is delivered by The National Archives to users in the UK Government, UK Parliament, Scottish government, Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly and Northern Ireland Executive. The National Archives uses external contractors to help deliver the Lawmaker service including through maintaining infrastructure and software, providing user support, ensuring security, developing new features and extending the service to new use cases.

At this point we anticipate this opportunity going out to procurement in the 2026/27 financial year.

Legislation services

The National Archives is responsible for providing the legislation.gov.uk Platform which:

makes both enacted and revised legislation available on the web for the public to access and use, and

provides legislation as open data for data users to include in their own products and services.

We use external contractors to manage the maintenance and development of this Platform, which includes the legislation.gov.uk website, a research website, the legislation.gov.uk editorial system, and the legislation.gov.uk publishing system. We are looking for suppliers with the technical skills and experience to maintain and continuously develop the legislation.gov.uk Platform to ensure it is accessible, robust and performant.

Statutory responsibilities for the official publication of all UK legislation are managed through a separate publishing concessionary contract. We provide the concessionaire with access to the legislation.gov.uk publishing system so that they can publish legislation both online and in print.

At this point we anticipate this opportunity going out to procurement in the 2026/27 financial year.

Digital Services

External suppliers play a critical role in enabling the successful delivery of our wide portfolio of digital services. In the coming years we will continue to invest in, among other things, securing and expanding our digital archive, developing our catalogue management and digital preservation systems, and growing the Find Case Law service.

IT Operations

The National Archive's IT Operations department is responsible for the provision and support of Corporate IT services and systems.

Some technologies and key areas of expertise that we're interested in

User research

Interaction and content design

Accessibility

Front end development

DevOps

Cloud infrastructure architecture, management and financial optimisation

Service management and security

Data analysis and visualisation

Generative AI and LLMs

NLP and text processing

Semantic technologies, linked data and knowledge graphs

Akoma Ntoso/LegalDocML (OASIS standard for legislative and legal documents)

XML, X-Query, XSLT, RDF and SPARQL

HTML-5, JSON, Java, Javascript, CSS

RESTful APIs, XML and noSQL databases, Drupal

Register your interest

To register, please email procurement@nationalarchives.gov.uk by midday on 11 July 2025, giving the name of your organisation, and the names and roles of proposed attendees. Please state if you want to attend online (presentations only).