King's Printer for Scotland: annual report 2022 to 2023

Priorities for 2023 to 2024                        

4.1  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.

4.2  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.

4.3  We will aid legal certainty in delivering the aims of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023, assisting in the identification of assimilated EU law. We will carry out user research to understand the needs of legislation users in relation to assimilated EU law and develop features to help Scottish users understand whether this legislation continues to apply to them.

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 the accessibility of legislation in Scotland. This will include further improvements to the legislation.gov.uk user interface, enhanced editorial features to support the increased demands of revising legislation – including working with Scottish legislation drafters to improve the presentation of restricted jurisdiction amendments relating to Scotland. We will publish more contextual data about legislation to aid user understanding, and will be making advanced tools for querying legislation datasets available to all users. We are also digitising over 300,000 historic Acts and older Statutory Instruments currently unavailable on legislation.gov.uk, many of which were applicable to Scotland.

4.5  We are investing in an overhaul of the legislation.gov.uk publishing system, to improve the experience of Scottish legislation drafters, including the ongoing integration of the Lawmaker drafting tool to allow more effective creation, management and publishing of Scottish Bills, Acts and SSIs.