King's Printer for Scotland: annual report 2021 to 2022

Activities and developments: 1 April 2021 – 31 March 2022

3.1 14 ASPs received Royal Assent between 1 April 2021 and 31 March 2022 (see Annex A).

3.2 14 Explanatory Notes to ASPs were published in this period (see Annex B).

3.3 444 Scottish Statutory Instruments were registered and published (see Annex C), plus an additional 77 draft Scottish Instruments.

3.4 The coronavirus pandemic continued to have an impact on Scottish legislation in 2021-22 as the Scottish Government made health protection legislation to implement restrictions and other measures to protect the public, business, and the health service. Due to the rapidly changing situation, legislation was required to be registered and published to tight timeframes. The KPS made arrangements for an enhanced publishing support service to be available on demand, seven days a week. In total 94 Coronavirus SSIs were published in 2021-22, compared to 152 the previous year.

3.5 In order to ensure that retained EU, Scottish and UK legislation can be kept up to date with the changes to the law triggered by EU Exit on 31December 2020, the Legislation Services editorial team identified and published over 145,000 amendments from EU Exit SIs and SSIs. These amendments are in the process of being incorporated into the texts of legislation on legislation.gov.uk over the next 2-3 years. Of these amendments, the domestic impact on Scottish legislation includes 335 items of Primary and Secondary legislation affected by EU Exit legislation, comprising over 7,000 amendments.

3.6 The year has seen further substantial progress in the project to deliver a new browser-based legislation drafting and amending tool, named Lawmaker. This project is a partnership between Scottish Parliament, Parliamentary Counsel’s Office, The National Archives, The Office of Parliamentary Counsel, and the UK Houses of Parliament. This browser-based tool will eventually replace the range of tools that are used by the partners to prepare and amend draft legislation. A single, shared tool should reduce the cost of publication, and improve the presentation of bills and amendments online. It will improve the ability of the Scottish Parliament to manage and integrate bill and amendment information (for example permitting the auto-updating of bills, and enabling a user to see how a particular amendment would alter the text of a bill if agreed to). By taking an open standards-based approach, Lawmaker allows for well-structured and organised bill and amendment data to be made available via data.parliament.scot.  

3.7 Initial development of the Lawmaker tool completed, with the service transitioning to a live service, managed by The National Archives on behalf of the partners, in January 2022. The majority of Scottish Bills in 2021-22 were drafted on Lawmaker, with a commitment to creating all new Bills in Lawmaker by 2022-23.

3.8 The legislation.gov.uk editorial team continues to capture new amendment information and publish updated versions of legislation, with the long-term goal of bringing primary legislation up to date largely complete. In 2020 the team expanded the scope of legislation to be updated, to include selected secondary legislation (SSI’s since 2018 and Retained EU legislation), and introduced a new measure for tracking progress. Since 2020-21, legislation.gov.uk has tracked the proportion of page views of revised legislation showing as being up to date (i.e. with a green amendment status label). This measure recognises that the status of a piece of legislation will change over time, as new amendments are made, as well as encouraging the editorial team to prioritise work on legislation, which is being viewed – thereby maintaining a focus on users’ needs. The high amount of EU Exit amendments meant that at the beginning of 2021-22, around 45% of viewed revised legislation was in-force. This had risen to 92% by the end of the year, with an ongoing aim to maintain a level of over 95%.

3.9 A total of 4,703 amendments from Acts of the Scottish Parliament and Scottish SI’s published between 1 April 2021 and 31 March 2022 were recorded and published on legislation.gov.uk by the editorial team, out of a total of over 46,424 amendments recorded for all jurisdictions (i.e. 10% were made by Scottish legislation). This is a 60% decrease in Scottish amendments from the previous year, again, due to the one-off impact of EU Exit legislation – there was a 53% reduction across all jurisdictions, largely due to the impact of EU Exit legislation. During this period a further 1,388 updates were made to the texts of Scottish Primary legislation, as well as 5,414 updates to Scottish SI’s. In total 6,802 Scottish amendments were applied, accounting for 6.7% of the total 101,900 amendments applied to UK and Retained EU legislation. The majority of these amendments related to EU Exit, and are applicable in Scotland, and 354 pieces of Scottish legislation have been affected by EU Exit legislation, totalling over 7,000 amendments.

3.10 Lists of new Scottish legislation are made available every day.

3.11 There were no FOI requests for staff working for the KPS in 2021-22.

3.12 Crown Copyright advice was given to the Remobilisation, Recovery and Reform Division in the Scottish Government on Crown copyright aspects of the proposal to transfer the website of the National Adult Protection Coordinator for Scotland from the Scottish Government to the University of Stirling; the Community Justice Division on the proposal to transfer a risk assessment tool from the websites of Scottish local authorities and the Scottish Prison Service to an external IT managed service provider; and the Black Watch Museum in Perth, on a proposal to digitise copies of military service records in its collection.

Financing the King’s Printer for Scotland

3.13 Under the Scotland Act 1998, the King’s Printer of Acts of Parliament is appointed KPS. The KPS is also the Keeper and CEO of The National Archives, and by agreement with the Scottish Government, the Keeper provides the necessary resources to support the work of the KPS. In consideration of this, the Scottish Government has agreed to pay The National Archives an annual management charge covering the period 1 April to 31 March (inclusive) each year.

3.14 This section covers the management charges for 2021/2022. The management charge for this period was £97,393. These figures are based on the actual level of work undertaken in relation to the operation and maintenance of the legislation.gov.uk platform, and the compiling of legislative amendment data in relation to Scottish legislation in that year.

3.15 An analysis of the management charges (exc. VAT) between staff costs and non-pay costs is shown below with the previous years’ costs included for comparison: