King's Printer for Scotland: annual report 2022 to 2023

Activities and developments

Activities and developments: 1 April 2022 – 31 March 2023

3.1 9 ASPs received Royal Assent between 1 April 2022 and 31 March 2023 (see annex A).

3.2 10 Explanatory Notes to ASPs were published in this period (see annex B).

3.3 378 Scottish Statutory Instruments were registered and published (see annex C), plus an additional 61 draft Scottish Instruments.  

3.4 In order to ensure that retained EU, Scottish and UK legislation can be kept up to date with the changes to the law triggered by EU Exit on 31 December 2020, as well as amendments subsequent to that date, the Legislation Services editorial team have identified and published over 157,000 amendments from EU Exit SIs and SSIs. These amendments are in the process of being incorporated into the texts of legislation on legislation.gov.uk. Of these amendments, the domestic impact on Scottish legislation includes 354 items of Primary and Secondary legislation affected by EU Exit legislation, comprising over 7,000 amendments.         

3.5 The year saw further substantial progress in establishing the new browser-based legislation drafting and amending tool, named Lawmaker, as the primary tool for drafting all legislation in the UK and Scotland. Lawmaker is managed by The National Archives on behalf of 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 is replacing a range of tools that are used by the partners to prepare and amend draft legislation, reducing the cost of publication, and improving the presentation of bills and amendments online. It has improved 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.  

3.6 In the year 2022-23, the Lawmaker service continued to be managed by The National Archives on behalf of its partners, with there being an ongoing roll-out of the service to UK and Scottish primary and secondary legislation drafters. All Scottish Bills in 2022-23 were drafted on Lawmaker, and The National Archives supported the Scottish Government in using Lawmaker for drafting Scottish SI’s, with one SSI being drafted through use of the tool.

3.7 In 2022-23, the legislation.gov.uk editorial team continued to capture new amendment information and publish updated versions of legislation, with the goal of bringing primary legislation up to date being completed. In 2020, the team expanded the scope of legislation to be updated, to include selected secondary legislation (SSI’s made since 2018, retained secondary EU legislation and high priority older SSIs), and introduced a new measure for tracking progress. Since 2020-21, legislation.gov.uk has tracked the proportion of page views of revised legislation showing as being up to date (i.e., with a green amendment status). This measure recognises that the status of a piece of legislation will change over time, as new amendments are made, as well as maintaining a focus on the most commonly accessed Scottish legislation. At the end of 2022-23, 96% of revised legislation page-views were up to date, with there being an aim to maintain a level of over 95% moving forward. In addition, legislation.gov.uk carried up-to-date versions of amended Welsh language legislation, providing revised legislation bilingually for the first time.

3.8 A total of 3,703 amendments from Acts of the Scottish Parliament and Scottish SI’s were published between 1 April 2022 and 31 March 2023. These were recorded and published on legislation.gov.uk by the editorial team, out of a total of over 46,778 amendments recorded for all jurisdictions (i.e., 8% were made by Scottish legislation). The overall annual number of new amendments from both Scottish legislation and UK legislation decreased in this period by 21% for Scottish legislation, while increasing by 1% for UK legislation. During this period, a further 920 updates were made to the texts of Scottish Primary legislation, as well as 8,440 updates to Scottish SI’s. In total, 9,360 Scottish amendments were applied, accounting for 8.1% of the total 115,600 amendments applied to UK and retained EU legislation. There were 315 amendments made by Scottish legislation that affected retained EU legislation, and 354 pieces of Scottish legislation were affected by EU Exit legislation, totalling 7,260 amendments.

3.9 Lists of new Scottish legislation are made available every day online.

3.10 There were five FOI requests for staff working for the KPS in 2022-23.

3.11 During this period, the KPS visited Historic Environment Scotland to discuss issues of Crown Copyright, the re-use of PSI licensing and copyright issues relating to the HES formation and the National Collection of Air Photography.

3.12   Staff working for the KPS provided copyright management advice in the following areas:

• The Adult Social Care Workforce and Fair Work Division at the Scottish Government and the University of Glasgow, on the intellectual property rights in a collaborative work, and assisted colleagues with an inquiry originating in Heriot-Watt University about licensing of research work commissioned by the Ministry of Defence;
• Marine Scotland, on publishing source code under the Open Government Licence, and about a journal article publishing agreement;
• On the use and re-use of Crown Copyright material used in the development of a new version of the Scottish Schools Information created for the SEEMiS Early Years Project;
• The Directorate for Population Health at Scottish Government, on making a dataset available under the Open Government Licence as part of a collaboration agreement.

Financing the King’s Printer for Scotland

3.13  Under the Scotland Act 1998, the King’s Printer of Acts of Parliament is appointed KPS. The KPS 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 KPS. 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.

3.14  This section covers the management charges for 2022-23. The management charge for this period is £100,753. 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.

3.15  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: