Acts of Parliament - otherwise known as UK Statutes - are actually quite straightforward to reference but can catch students out because the in-text citations and full reference list entries behave differently to other sources.
In-text citation
The in-text citation is literally just the Act title including the year, all in italics and with no need for a separating comma before the date. You can either name the Act directly as part of your sentence - According to the Health and Social Care Act 2012.. - or refer more generally to the law or legislation and then give the Act details inside round brackets, e.g. Recent social care legislation (Health and Social Care Act 2012) ...
If you need to pinpoint a specific section of the Act that you are drawing your information from, work the section details into your sentence as part of your writing, e.g. As defined in section 10(2) of the Act (Children Act 2004) ...
If you refer to different specific sections of the same Act throughout your work, as described in the previous point, there is no requirement for you to have multiple entries for the Act in your reference list. The design of Harvard style means that no matter how many times you refer to the exact same source there will only ever be one entry for the source in your reference list.
Reference list
Cite Them Right Harvard then asks for the following information for the full reference:
- Title of Act including year and chapter number (in italics)
- Country/jurisdiction (only if referencing more than one country's legislation)
- Available at: URL (Accessed: date)
Example: Health and Social Care Act 2012, c. 7. Available at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2012/7/contents/enacted (Accessed: 17 September 2018).
- Please note that the chapter number (c.) usually appears by default alongside the Act's year on websites such as legislation.gov.uk. The entire Act will have the same chapter number to help distinguish it from other Acts published in the same legislative year:
