King's Printer for Scotland: annual report 2023 to 2024

How we work

Publishing legislation

2.1 The statutory requirements to print, publish and distribute Scottish legislation and associated products are delivered by the Legislation Services team at The National Archives, and through a commercial contract with a supplier. This legislation contract is currently awarded to The Stationery Office, part of Williams Lea. The contract sets out the specifications and timescales that need to be adhered to for the publication of new ASPs and SSIs both digitally and in print.

2.2 Scottish legislation and associated documents are published via the online legislation.gov.uk publishing system, which is used by legislation drafters in the Scottish government to validate secondary legislation and submit documents for publication, and by the KPS and its contractor to manage all the steps of the publishing process. The system assures the integrity of the data published on legislation.gov.uk by recording the process through a publishing audit trail. The publishing system is also used to register SSIs – a process that involves automatic and manual checks to ensure that documents meet the criteria for publication and that the documents are correctly numbered and can be accurately cited.

2.3 Scottish drafters previously used a range of Word templates to draft legislation. In 2023 to 2024, ASPs were produced entirely using the new legislation drafting, authoring and amending tool – Lawmaker – which is managed by The National Archives.

2.4 Currently, SSIs are still mostly drafted using a bespoke Secondary Legislation drafting Word template, created and maintained by the KPS. Before legislation can be published online and printed, these Word files have to be converted into Crown Legislation Markup Language (CLML) - the open standard format for legislation data specified by the KPS. This conversion process is carried out under the legislation publishing contract and is largely automated, with manual quality control and correction carried out by the supplier as required. Lawmaker also allows the drafting of secondary legislation, and there is an aim that it will replace the Word template for SSI drafting over the course of the next few years.

2.5 Legislation as it is originally enacted or made, and in a revised form showing how it has changed over time, is published on legislation.gov.uk. You can find Scottish legislation online. The website also makes available Acts of the Old Scottish Parliament (AOSPs). If required, as-enacted or made Scottish legislation is also printed and made available for purchase.

2.6 The legislation.gov.uk website serves around 30 million page views each month, and an average of 1.9 million users per month in 2023 to 2024, an increase of 20% and 19% respectively from 2022 to 2023. Users include legal professionals, non-legal trained professionals, government staff, academics and members of the public. The site has been carefully designed to help non-legally trained users to understand the status of the legislation they are looking at – whether the legislation is in force, up to date and applies to where they live. Users can also find ‘point in time’ versions of legislation showing how the law stood at a particular point in time. You can see an example of this.

2.7 In addition to online and print publishing, legislation data is available for re-use in a variety of formats. To make data extraction easier, all legislation search result pages are available as ATOM feeds by adding “/data.feed” to the link. For example, the feed for the search result page:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021   

would be:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/data.feed

2.8 All of the content on the website is available for re-use under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated. This site additionally now contains legislation originating from the European Union, captured under the King’s Printer’s duty to publish EU legislation under Schedule 5 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.