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

Priorities for 2025 to 2026

4.1 The legislation.gov.uk editorial team will continue to prioritise the creation and maintenance of up to date Scottish legislation in order to aid legal certainty in Scotland. We will ensure that the most viewed pieces of Scottish legislation are prioritised for update, as well as responding to requests from the Scottish Government to prioritise legislation relating to developing policy, as required. 

4.2 The editorial team will aim to ensure a minimum of 95% of all the viewed revised legislation on legislation.gov.uk is up to date. In addition, we will continue work to bring up to date pre-2018 secondary legislation, which was original outside the scope of the service, with the aim to bring all secondary legislation (including all Scottish secondary legislation) up to date over the next few years. 

4.3 We will further enhance our editorial system to support the increasing demands of revising legislation, including making use of machine assistance and AI. We will take opportunities to explore new technologies to help build our capacity so that we can expand on the legislation data we capture, for example capturing more information on geographical extent and territorial application to help meet user needs and further aid legal certainty. 

4.4  We will continue to invest in the design, function and maintenance of the legislation.gov.uk service, to aid legal certainty, improve the accessibility of legislation in Scotland, prioritising cyber security throughout. We will modernise the technology that underpins the legislation.gov.uk platform so that it is fully responsive on mobile devices and make it possible to deliver more advanced features on user interface. We will start to take forward some of the findings from the user research undertaken during 2024-2025, which focused on the presentation of jurisdictional amendments relating to Scotland, when prioritising new website features.   

4.5 We will continue our work to reorganise, categorise and improve search functionality in relation to the legislation originating from the EU published on legislation.gov.uk. This work will consider findings from user research and aims to improve the user experience in relation to the assimilated EU law, which continues to apply in Scotland. 

4.6 Investment to develop the legislation.gov.uk publishing system will also continue this year, this will improve the experience of Scottish legislation drafters and includes the ongoing integration of the Lawmaker drafting tool to allow more effective creation, management and publishing of Scottish Bills, Acts and SSIs.