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

Priorities for 2024 to 2025  

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, aiming to ensure 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 work to reorganise, categorise and improve search functionality in relation to the legislation originating from the EU published on legislation.gov.uk. This work will consider findings from user research and aims to improve the user experience in relation to the assimilated EU law, which continues to apply in Scotland.

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 continuing working with Scottish legislation drafters to improve the presentation of restricted jurisdiction amendments relating to Scotland, undertaking targeted user research to help evidence new website features. 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 will also continue with our digitisation project to back capture historic Acts and older Statutory Instruments currently unavailable on legislation.gov.uk, many of which were applicable to Scotland.

4.5 Investment to develop the legislation.gov.uk publishing system also continues this year, this will improve the experience of Scottish legislation drafters, and includes the ongoing integration of the Lawmaker drafting tool to allow more effective creation, management and publishing of Scottish Bills, Acts and SSIs.