Queen's Printer for Scotland: annual report 2020 to 2021

Activities and developments: 1 April 2020 – 31 March 2021

3.1 22 ASPs received Royal Assent between 1 April 2020 and 31 March 2021 (see annex A).

3.2 20 Explanatory Notes to ASPs were published in this period (see annex B).

3.3 544 Scottish Statutory Instruments were registered and published in this period (see annex C), plus an additional 103 draft Scottish Instruments. 

3.4  The coronavirus pandemic had a significant impact on Scottish legislation in 2020-21. The Scottish Government created a range of health protection legislation to implement restrictions and other measures to protect the public, businesses, and the health service. Due to the rapidly changing situation, emergency legislation was required and needed to be registered and published to tight timeframes and often outside of normal business hours. The QPS made arrangements for an enhanced publishing support service to be available on demand, seven days a week. In total 152 coronavirus SSIs were published in 2020-21, of which 18 were published outside of core business hours.

3.5 The pandemic period saw a high level of public interest in coronavirus legislation, with the number of users of legislation.gov.uk being up to three times higher than in the previous year. User research carried out by the QPS demonstrated that the four most commonly viewed pieces of Scottish legislation in this period related directly to the coronavirus. To aid legal certainty and assist the public during this period, the QPS created a new webpage, with advice on finding rules and curated links to the most important pieces of up to date Scottish coronavirus legislation. Coronavirus legislation was regularly amended as guidance changed, and the editorial team prioritised amendments to coronavirus SSIs, making 2,500 changes, usually within 24-48 hours of amendments coming into force.

3.6 A continuing priority in 2020-21 was the preparation of legislation.gov.uk to meet the legislative publishing challenges of EU Exit. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 repealed the European Communities Act 1972 and converted a large body of EU Law into domestic legislation. Schedule 5 of the 2018 Act sets out the powers and duties of the Queen’s Printer with regards to the publication of relevant EU material. This legislation continued to be selected and published on legislation.gov.uk until the EU Withdrawal Implementation Period ended at 11pm on 31 December 2020, with over 150,000 EU regulations, decisions, directives and treaties now available. In addition, 2020-21 continued to see significant amounts of secondary legislation being made in preparation for EU Exit, including 29 EU Exit SSIs, containing amendments to correct the text of relevant domestic and retained legislation to ensure that they continued to be functional after exit. 

3.7  In order to ensure that retained EU, Scottish and UK legislation can be kept up to date with the changes to the law required by EU Exit, the Legislation Services editorial team have identified and published over 145,000 amendments from EU Exit SIs and SSIs. These amendments will be incorporated into the texts of legislation on legislation.gov.uk over the next two to three 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. In addition, a new EU Exit Web Archive  has been created, containing a wide selection of EU materials from EUR-Lex, to ensure that the full body of EU law, including case law, is available as it stood at the end of the implementation period.    

3.8   The year saw 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.

3.9  Development work on Lawmaker saw significant progress during the year. The majority of Scottish Bills are now drafted on Lawmaker, and functionality has now been developed to allow the drafting and publishing of Scottish Bill Amendments on Lawmaker.

3.10  The legislation.gov.uk editorial team continues to maintain a high level of output, ensuring that the QPS can capture and publish amendments online, and that revised primary legislation on legislation.gov.uk is fully up-to-date. At the end of March 2019, 99.5% of all revised primary legislation, including Scottish Acts, were fully updated, so in 2020-21 editorial scope was extended to begin updating Scottish secondary legislation, prioritising SSIs from 2018 onwards.

3.11  A total of 11,624 amendments from Acts of the Scottish Parliament and Scottish SIs published between 1 April 2020 and 31 March 2021 were recorded and published on legislation.gov.uk by the editorial team, out of a total of over 99,000 amendments recorded for all jurisdictions. This is a 100% increase in Scottish amendments from the previous year, and a 50% increase in the number of amendments for all jurisdictions, largely due to the impact of EU Exit legislation. A further 1,085 updates were made to the texts of Scottish Primary legislation on legislation.gov.uk, as well as 6,287 updates to Scottish SIs, accounting for 10.6% of the total 69,800 amendments applied to UK legislation. 

3.12  Lists of new Scottish legislation are made available every day online: Legislation.gov.uk

3.13  There were no FOI requests for staff working for the QPS in 2020-21. 

3.14  Historic Environment Scotland sought copyright guidance from the QPS in relation to the use of an archival photograph on social media channels.

3.15  Staff working for the QPS advised the Scottish Government Learning Directorate working on the National Improvement Framework Unit and online national standardised assessments in the medium of Gaelic to learners in Scotland about the process of Delegation of Authority, public task and licensing outside the Open Government Licence.

3.16  National Records of Scotland were advised on licensing options for Crown-owned copyright material, and copyright and licensing statements.

Financing the Queen’s Printer for Scotland 

3.17  Under the Scotland Act 1998, the Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament is appointed the QPS. The QPS 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 QPS. 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.

3.18  This section covers the management charges for 2020/2021. The management charge for this period is £96,108. 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.

3.19  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: