King's Printer for Scotland: annual report 2024 to 2025

How we work

Publishing legislation 

2.1 The statutory requirements to print, publish and distribute Scottish legislation and associated products are delivered by the Legislation Services team at The National Archives, and through commercial contracts with suppliers. The legislation Platform Contract and the Publishing Contract are currently held by The Stationery Office, part of Williams Lea. The Publishing Contract sets out the specifications and timescales that need to be adhered to for the publication of new ASPs and SSIs both digitally and in print.

2.2 Scottish legislation and associated documents are published via the legislation.gov.uk publishing system, which is used by legislation drafters in the Scottish government to validate the formatting of secondary legislation and submit documents for publication, and by the KPS and its contractor to manage all the steps of the publishing process. The system assures the integrity of the data published on legislation.gov.uk, including by recording the process through a publishing audit trail. The publishing system is also used to register SSIs. The process involves automatic and manual checks to ensure that documents meet the criteria for publication, that the documents are correctly numbered and can be correctly, and uniquely, cited. 

2.3 Since the reporting year 2023-24 all ASPs have been produced using the new legislation drafting, authoring and amending tool – Lawmaker. This is managed by a service team at The National Archives.  

2.4 Lawmaker is delivered on behalf of a partnership between the Scottish Parliament, Parliamentary Counsel 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.   

2.5 SSI drafters began transitioning to Lawmaker for producing SSIs. During this reporting year, 18 SSIs were drafted using Lawmaker out of a total of 461. Although that number is relatively low, the trend is positive, with increasing use of Lawmaker towards the end of the reporting period. A plan is in place to broaden usage of Lawmaker for drafting SSIs over the next year.  

2.6 SSIs not produced using Lawmaker were drafted using a bespoke Secondary Legislation drafting template in Word. This was created by and is maintained by the KPS. Before legislation can be published online and printed, the documents (Word files) must be converted into Crown Legislation Markup Language (CLML). This is the open standard format for legislation data specified by the KPS. The conversion process is largely automated, with manual quality control and formatting corrections made as needed.

2.7 Lawmaker simplifies the publication process. It also offers features that enhance the drafting experience, such as the ability to import legislation directly from legislation.gov.uk or automatically create footnotes detailing the amendment history of cited legislation. The aim is to fully transition drafters to Lawmaker for producing all Scottish legislation.

2.8 The legislation.gov.uk website contains legislation as it is originally enacted or made, and legislation in a revised form showing how it has changed over time. You can find Scottish legislation online. The website also makes available Acts of the Old Scottish Parliament (AOSPs). Scottish legislation, as enacted, is also printed and made available for purchase in hard copy.  

2.9 The website additionally contains legislation originating from the European Union, including assimilated direct legislation in revised form. This was first published to fulfil the King’s Printer of Acts of Parliament’s duty in Schedule 5 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.

2.10 There were 60 million page views to legislation.gov.uk, with an average of 1.5 million users each month, in 2024-25. Users include legal professionals, non-legally trained professionals, government staff, academics and members of the general public. The site has been carefully designed to help non-legally trained users to understand the status of the legislation they are looking at – whether the legislation is in force, up to date and applies to where they live. Users can also find ‘point in time’ versions of legislation showing how the law stood at particular time.  

2.11 The legislation.gov.uk website makes available legislation as machine processable data for re-use by third parties. Several different formats are supported, including the Legal Document Mark-up language. To make data extraction easier, search result pages are made available as ATOM feeds. This can be accessed by adding “/data.feed” to the link. For example, the feed for the search result page: 

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2024    

is:  

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2024/data.feed 

2.12 All of the content is available for re-use under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated.  

Publishing lists and annual editions 

2.13 The Interpretation and Legislative Reform (Scotland) Act 2010 provides for the publication of lists and annual editions of Scottish legislation. This is delivered by a specialist editorial team and through the services provided under the Publishing Contract. 

2.14  After new ASPs and SSIs are published, legal editors analyse their impact on existing legislation. They also identify key contextual information such as the jurisdictional extent and commencement date(s). Such provisions can impact the text of existing legislation; or alter the scope or application of the law without changing the text at all. All changes to legislation, including commencement information and extent information are captured using a bespoke editorial system. Outstanding changes are published and searchable via the ‘changes to legislation’ feature or by selecting the drop down lists of amendments in the Outstanding Changes alert boxes that are displayed above the text of any affected revised legislation. You can see a list of changes to ASPs.

And a list of changes to SSIs

2.15 The production of printed Bound Volumes of ASPs and SSIs is delivered through the Publishing Contract. The volumes include Tables of Effects, which show the changes made by UK or Scottish legislation on previously enacted ASPs and SSIs. These lists are created using information from the editorial system, which is carefully checked and assured by a legal editor and a reviewer.