Hansard

... is named after Thomas Curson Hansard (1776–1833), a London printer and publisher, who in 1809 became the first official printer to parliament. The earliest reports were taken from the newspapers and edited by William Cobbett. Other publishers produced rival coverage, but in 1878 a subsidy was granted to the Hansard press and at that point reporters were employed. Even then, there were widespread complaints about the accuracy of the coverage.

The Hansard of today – a comprehensive account of every speech – began in 1909, when Parliament took over the publication and established its own staff of official Hansard reporters.

Hansard is not a word–for–word transcript of debates in Parliament. Its terms of reference were set by a House of Commons Select Committee in 1893, as being a report "which, though not strictly verbatim, is substantially the verbatim report with repetitions and redundancies omitted and with obvious mistakes (including grammatical mistakes) corrected, but which, on the other hand, leaves out nothing that adds to the meaning of the speech or illustrates the argument."

The name Hansard is used for the equivalent records of the national and regional parliaments of many Commonwealth countries, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.