Editorial Update/Blanket Amendments
A provision may make an amendment or modification that is framed in such a way as to affect legislation generally rather than any specific enactment. We call this a “blanket amendment‟.
An example of a blanket amendment that changes the text of affected legislation might be: “For the words "Supreme Court Act 1981" wherever they occur in any enactment substitute "Senior Courts Act”.
During the identify and record effects tasks we will identify textual blanket amendments. We will identify which legislation is affected by the blanket amendments but we won’t work out and record every provision that needs to be changed as a result.
If you are presented with a “blanket amendment” type of effects you should:
- Read the affecting provision carefully and ensure you are clear on what words needs editing and whether there are any exceptions to the amendment.
- Open the whole Act on legislation.gov.uk and search for the words to be edited, the amendment will usually be a substitution. Make a list of all the affected provisions, it is helpful to add the list to the ‘notes’ against the blanket amendment effect so that the reviewer knows what you have changed.
- Use the Table of Contents to check out the most appropriate level of the Act in to which to carry out your amendment. For example, if there is only one change to one provision required you can check out the individual provision but if there are a lot of amendments you may want to check out a whole Part or even the whole Act.
- Follow the appropriate instructions for the amendment concerned, each time you carry out the amendment you should highlight the task in the ‘Resource Manager’ window and a new annotation will be created (unless the words are in the same provision and then you will get just one annotation).
- The annotation should read “Words in Act substituted XX” or “Words in Measure substituted” – the individual provisions will not be specified.
Blanket amendment by The Treaty of Lisbon (Changes in Terminology) Order 2011 (S.I. 2011/1043)
There are some blanket amendments by The Treaty of Lisbon (Changes in Terminology) Order 2011 (S.I. 2011/1043), which you need to be aware of when doing secondary update. It would be helpful if editors could check their secondary update legislation to see if it may be affected by these blanket amendments and, if so, let Richard or another reviewer know so we can carry these amendments through.
In a nutshell, the 2011 Order changes old references to the “European Community” to new references to the “European Union”.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/1043/made
Art. 4 substitutes certain non-adjectival uses of the word “Community”, etc. Art. 5 substitutes a particular phrase wherever it occurs. Art. 6 substitutes particular adjectival uses of the word “Community”, etc. Please note the exceptions provided for in arts. 3, 4(2), 6(4)(5). In particular, NI Orders in Council and any secondary legislation made under them are excluded. Arts. 8-10 do the same thing for Welsh legislation.
The drafter has provided handy examples of when and when not to change the text in Annex II of the Explanatory Note (Table of Examples as to how this Order will operate on terms in legislation):
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2011/1043/note/made
In Annex I of the Explanatory Note the drafter also provided some examples of secondary legislation that is affected by these blanket amendments and we have used this to put some effects in TOES. However, we have not captured all affected secondary legislation and so it would help if editors could check their update document before update starts to see if it may be affected. If it looks like it may be affected, let Richard or another reviewer know so that they can change TOES to add an effect which will then show up in your update timeline. If you spot it after update has been done, then let Richard or another reviewer know so that a correction can be done. I would advise doing a Ctrl+F search across the whole document looking for the following terms:
“Community” “Communities” “Article 310 of the Treaty of Amsterdam”
In the meantime we will ask the data management team if they can query the secondary legislation to see if we can find all the legislation which may be affected by these blanket amendments.
Note on applying blanket amendments that have been captured in TOES so far
Please note that we have provided very general TOES data for the effects created from the drafter’s examples: https://editorial.legislation.gov.uk/changes/affecting/uksi/2011/1043/data.xls?extended=full-with-co&sort=affecting-year-number
For example, the effect below has a very general affecting provision:
| 1995 SI1159 | Blanket amendment | words substituted | 2011 SI1043 | art. 003-6 8-10 | NB This entry taken from examples in EN | art. 002 | 22/04/2011 | wholly in force |
E+W+S+NI
If we look at the affected document for this effect we can see that it contains 4 references to the European Community in the Preamble and regs. 5(5), 10(4). (We would ignore the use of “European Communities” in the reference to the European Communities Act 1972 in the Preamble as it is excluded by art. 3(2)(g) of the 2011 Order). http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1995/1159/made For these amendments we would only need to cite “art. 4” as the affecting provision, so the update editor should change the update annotation as required to cover their particular situation.