The old statute law websites at OPSI and the Statute Law Database are being mothballed and replaced with a single site: legislation.gov.uk. The new site promises to ”[bring] together the legislative content currently held on the OPSI website and revised legislation from the Statute Law Database to provide a single legislation service that replaces the current services”. It claims to hold:
- All legislation from 1988 – present day is available on this site (see ‘What legislation is missing’ for details of any known legislation we do not carry)
- There are no secondary legislation items (e.g Statutory Instruments) available before 1988 as they are not available in a web-publishable format.
- Most pre-1988 primary legislation is available on this site. In some cases we only have the original published (as enacted) version and no revised version. This occurs if the legislation was wholly repealed before 1991 and therefore was not included in the revised data set when it was extracted from Statutes in Force. In other cases we may only have a revised version if the original (as enacted) version is not available in a web-publishable format.
This can only be welcome. There have been major problems with a system that was creaky, dispersed and unreliable. This was clear in R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467, where a confiscation order was made improperly using legislation that was five years out of date because the changes were not reflected online. Toulson LJ noted (between paragraphs 68 to 72):
There is no comprehensive statute law database with hyperlinks which would enable an intelligent person, by using a search engine, to find out all the legislation on a particular topic. This means that the courts are in many cases unable to discover what the law is, or was at the date with which the court is concerned, and are entirely dependent on the parties for being able to inform them what were the relevant statutory provisions which the court has to apply. This lamentable state of affairs has been raised by responsible bodies on many occasions, including the House of Lords Committee on the Merits of Secondary Legislation.
…
It is a serious state of affairs when the relevant legislation is not accessible, the Government’s own public information website (OPSI) is incomplete and the prosecution in an excise case unintentionally misleads the court as to the relevant Regulations in force. Although the problem has in this case arisen in an excise context, it is part of a wider problem of substantial constitutional importance.
Hopefully putting everything in one place under the control of the National Archives should help get on top of things. Though they state that legislation is only up-to-date to the end of 2002, we will at least now have an idea whether legislation is out-of-date. The site is certainly easier both on the eye and to use. One hopes it is just the start of a wider overhaul.
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I’m struggling a little with what the difference between this new site and SLD is, a new skin aside. Slightly better search functions, certainly, but they don’t appear to intend to keep secondary legislation up to date, one key issue with SLD, or to work backward through the currently unaccessioned private acts. Hopefully both will change in the near future.
At the moment little difference, and part of it is the sheer volume of legislation (often unnecessarily) generated. My instinct is that putting everything in one place will force them to adapt by preventing buck-passing.