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

Future priorities

4.1 The Coronavirus response in Scotland has had a major, though reducing, legislative impact, as described in section 3.4 above. legislation.gov.uk has an ongoing commitment to aiding legal certainty in relation to coronavirus legislation. We will continue to offer extended service hours and expedited processes for the registration and publication of emergency SSIs as required, allowing for rapid publication outside of standard business hours. We will also continue to reduce our usual editorial timeframes in relation to coronavirus legislation, aiming to ensure amendments to health protection SSIs are published within 48 hours of coming into force.

4.2 We will continue our editorial effort to reduce the backlog of EU Exit amendments, prioritising according to user needs and maintaining revised legislation so that a minimum of 95% of viewed revised legislation on legislation.gov.uk is up to date.

4.3 In addition to EU Exit amendments, the legislation.gov.uk editorial team will continue to prioritise the creation and maintenance of up to date Scottish legislation in order to aid legal certainty in Scotland. We will ensure that the most viewed pieces of Scottish legislation are prioritised for update, as well as responding to requests from the Scottish Government to prioritise legislation relating to developing policy, as required.

4.4 We will continue to invest in the design, function and maintenance of the legislation.gov.uk service, to aid legal certainty and improve accessibility. This will include further improvements to the legislation.gov.uk user interface, enhanced editorial features to support the increased demands of revising legislation and the creation of revised versions of Welsh language legislation, new tools to publish and query legislation datasets. We are also digitising over 20,000 Private, Personal and Local Acts, many of which are specific to Scotland.

4.5 2022-23 will also see the first pieces of secondary Scottish legislation drafted on Lawmaker to be published, and the continuation of the roll-out of Lawmaker in the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government.