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

Future priorities

4.1 The coronavirus response in Scotland has had a major legislative impact, as described in sections 3.4 and 3.5 above. Legislation.gov.uk has an ongoing commitment to aiding legal certainty in relation to coronavirus legislation, which continues to evolve rapidly. 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 The EU withdrawal implementation period ended at 11pm on 31 December 2020, at which point the Queen’s Printer’s statutory duty to publish EU legislation was fulfilled. All amendment information from EU Exit SIs and SSIs has been captured and work is underway on the revision of UK legislation and retained EU legislation on legislation.gov.uk, with over 145,000 amendments to update. 

4.3 In addition to the EU Exit amendments, the legislation.gov.uk editorial team will continue to prioritise the creation and maintenance of up to date legislation in order to aid legal certainty in Scotland. To support the effective extension of editorial scope to include secondary legislation and retained EU law we have introduced a new method for prioritising legislation update work, based on the proportion of revised legislation viewed by users which is up to date. The coming into force of EU Exit amendments on 31 December 2020 has had a significant impact on this target, with an initial level of around 85% of relevant legislation up to date in December 2020 reducing to around 45% in January 2021. Our aim is to increase the proportion of all revised legislation on legislation.gov.uk that is up to date to over 90% by the end of 2021-22. 

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 new tools to publish and query legislation datasets.

4.5  2021-22 will also see the final delivery of a live Lawmaker service, the first pieces of secondary Scottish legislation drafted on Lawmaker being published, and the continuation of a gradual roll-out in the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government, including SSI drafters.