Parliament of the United Kingdom
supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom
The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom. It meets at the Palace of Westminster in London. It is bicameral, consisting of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, with the sovereign forming a third constitutional element. Acting together to legislate, these constitute the King-in-Parliament. Legislative authority has been devolved to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Parliament, and Northern Ireland Assembly to differing degrees, while the UK Parliament retains authority to legislate in reserved matters and the power to legislate in devolved areas.
The House of Commons is the elected lower chamber, comprising 650 members elected from single-member constituencies using first-past-the-post voting. The House of Lords is the upper chamber and consists of the Lords Temporal, principally life peers, and the Lords Spiritual, bishops of the Church of England. The Commons has legislative primacy: under the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, the Lords can generally delay, rather than permanently block, legislation passed by the Commons. The government must retain the confidence of the House of Commons, and ministers are accountable to Parliament through debates, questions, and parliamentary committees.
The present Parliament was created on 1 January 1801 under the Acts of Union 1800, which created the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliament of Ireland.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Parliament of the United Kingdom” as supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11010. VIAF identifies the subject as 148513878. The Library of Congress control number is n79017964. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1911, 1949, 1801 and 1800.
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This entry incorporates text from “Parliament of the United Kingdom” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.