Out-Law News 1 min. read
02 Aug 2010, 9:57 am
The site will be hosted and maintained by The National Archives, which will ensure that laws are kept up to date and revisions made by Parliament are reflected in the versions kept on the site.
Laws as they were passed are currently published on the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) site and revisions were reflected on the Statute Law Database.
"Legislation.gov.uk brings 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," said a statement on the new site. "The OPSI and SLD websites are in the process of being decommissioned with users re-directed to this new service."
The site contains all laws passed after 1988 and most of those enacted before that. "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 This occurs if the legislation was wholly repealed before 1991 and therefore was not included in the revised data set when it was extracted from Statutes in Force," said the site. "In other cases we may only have a revised version if the original (as enacted) version is not available in a web-publishable format."
The site said that it contained no secondary legislation, or statutory instruments, from before 1988.
Though the site aims to keep legislation up to date, it can only guarantee that it currently incorporates changes made up to the end of 2002. It said that around half of all items of legislation on the site are up to date to the present. Laws that have been changed but not updated will be marked to that effect on the site.
Government minister Lord McNally told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the service would be of value to the public as well as to legal workers.
"It is a tremendous treasure trove and I'm sure millions of people will make use [of it]," he said. "We think this will be really transforming. We are now using modern technology to make this available to everybody."
He said that some of the very old laws contained in the database are still live and still relevant.
"The Statute of Marlborough, which is [from] 1267 and still live, has within it protections against accountants," he said. "But yesterday a Parliamentary committee announced an inquiry into the big four accountancy firms – 800 years apart and yet Parliament is still doing its job."
