Revising Legislation/Introduction to Revising Legislation
The responsibility for revising legislation on legislation.gov.uk rests with The National Archives' Legislation Services team and, for Northern Ireland, with staff in the Northern Ireland Statutory Publications Office. If you'd like to find out more go to About us.
In addition to in-house editing, the Legislation Services Team is pursuing a new strategy which involves working with external expert participants from the legal publishing industry, government departments and the devolved administrations to bring all of the revised legislation fully up to date. New editorial tools have been developed which will help make the update task much faster and enable external participants to work collaboratively with our in-house teams towards the common goal of a comprehensive and up-to-date official source of revised legislation.
Revision of legislation on legislation.gov.uk involves, in simple terms, amending the text of the legislation where appropriate and adding annotations containing information about effects on legislation or other editorial information.
The following topics explain our approach to editing legislation, describe the types of annotation we use and give an overview of the main editorial conventions we follow in drafting annotations.
Our Approach to Editing Legislation
Principles
It is our aim to present the revised text of legislation clearly and accurately without gloss or comment. We will give authority for changes to the text, and record any other effects that make some difference to the meaning, scope or application of the legislation. But otherwise, we aim to let the legislation speak for itself precisely as the legislature has framed it.
Additional editorial information is used only sparingly, generally either to explain our presentation of the text where necessary or to draw attention to some difficulty in the reading of the text arising from the way in which it has been amended. We avoid interpretation as far as possible, though an element of interpretation may be required in deciding whether or how one piece of legislation affects another.
The Editorial Process
When we receive a new piece of legislation, a newly enacted Act for example, the first thing we do is to analyse it carefully to identify all its impacts on other legislation. These are mostly amendments to the text of the other legislation, but there are also many effects that do not change the text, such as when the other legislation is said to be ‘applied’ or ‘modified’.
At this point, we also note certain other information about new primary legislation, such as when it comes into force and its geographical extent or territorial application. This information will be used in setting up the timeline and extent facilities for the legislation and its provisions on the website. Once this information has been entered, and any annotations needed at this stage about commencement or extent have been inserted, the new legislation is deployed to the website as the ‘Latest Available (Revised)’ version. (A version of the legislation ‘As Enacted’ will have been published on the website shortly after it was enacted.)
As soon as the analysis of the legislation is complete, the extracted information about its effects on other legislation is tabulated. This is then added to the ‘Changes to Legislation’ facility on the website. This information also serves as a guide for the editor in the next stage of the process.
The bulk of the editorial work consists of carrying through the effects of the new legislation into the affected legislation by editing the text and adding appropriate annotations using a set of computer-based editing tools. This work necessarily takes rather longer than the initial processes. You will be notified whenever you access an item of legislation on the website if there are any effects that have not yet been applied to it in the Changes to Legislation information appearing at the top of the page you are viewing.
NOTE: the Changes to Legislation facility is updated with the effects of new legislation only after the editorial processes described above have been completed. These processes typically take from four to eight weeks to complete depending on the volume of new legislation. In some cases, such as where an Act is very large or heavily affecting, or a large number of Acts have received Royal Assent at the same time, it may take longer.