What is the UK Statute Law Database (SLD)?
Where can I get help using SLD?
What legislation is held on SLD?
Will I find new legislation on SLD?
How up to date is the legislation on SLD?
How will I know if there are any amendments not yet applied to my selected Act?
Can I find out the details of any amendments not yet applied to my selected Act?
How can I find out if an Act is in force?
Where can I find legislation that is not on SLD?
Can you help me to find the law on a particular subject?
Can you give me advice about a legal problem?
How do I open a whole Act on SLD?
What is the UK Statute Law Database (SLD)?
The UK Statute Law Database is the official revised version of the primary legislation of the UK made available online.
SLD is produced by the staff of the Statutory Publications Offices in London and Belfast. The London office is part of the Ministry of Justice. The Belfast office is the responsibility of the Office of the Legislative Counsel in Northern Ireland within the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister.
Where can I get help using SLD?
You will find comprehensive information on how to use SLD in the Help facility. There are three main ways of using Help: in ‘Contents’ mode you can navigate through the folders to find the topic you need; you can look for a topic in the alphabetical index; or you can type key words into the search box. We are developing an online tutorial to help users get started on SLD. Until this is available, there is a guide in PDF format, ‘An Introduction to the UK Statute Law Database’, which can be obtained from the Helpdesk. If you are unable to find the answers you need in Help or in these Frequently Asked Questions, please contact the Helpdesk.
What legislation is held on SLD?
SLD carries most (but not all) types of legislation, both primary and secondary. Most types of primary legislation are held in ‘revised’ form. This means that amendments made to them by subsequent legislation are incorporated into the text. Most types of secondary legislation on SLD are not revised and are held only in the form in which they were originally made.
For full listings see Types of Legislation on SLD.
Will I find new legislation on SLD?
Yes. Newly enacted legislation is loaded onto the SLD website as soon as is reasonably practicable following publication by The Stationery Office. For further information about our timescales for publication and a list of all legislation added to SLD within the last seven days see New Legislation.
How up-to-date is the legislation on SLD?
All legislation held on SLD in revised form has been updated at least to the end of 2002. Most of those items are also up-to-date to the present. For the remainder there are still effects outstanding for at least one of the years 2003 to the current year.
For further details see Update Status of Legislation.
How will I know if there are any amendments not yet applied to my selected Act?
When you access an item of legislation, a warning notice will appear on the ‘Results within legislation’ page listing the years for which there are outstanding amendments or other effects on that legislation. If no warning notice appears, you may assume that the legislation has been revised with any effects to date (but see the answer to the next question concerning the timescales for recording the effects of newly enacted legislation).
Can I find out the details of any amendments not yet applied to my selected Act?
Yes. All amendments and other effects on legislation for each of the years 2002 to the current year are listed in the ‘Tables of legislative effects’. Taken together, SLD and the tables will enable you to obtain a complete picture of all the effects on any given item of revised legislation held on SLD to date. But note that there will inevitably be an interval between the publication of new legislation on the SLD website and the effects of that legislation appearing in the tables. Typically, that interval will be no more than two weeks.
How can I find out if an Act is in force?
When SLD is fully up-to-date, all the information necessary to determine
whether or to what extent an item of legislation is in force will be contained
in the provisions of the legislation itself (start dates of relevant provisions
together with annotations containing 'in-force' information where appropriate).
Until that time, there are two ways of obtaining this information using
SLD:
You can use the 'Tables
of legislative effects': type the year and number of the relevant
item of legislation in the boxes for year and number of affected legislation,
then use the drop-down list for year of affecting legislation to search
for effects in each of the years since the year for which the legislation
was last updated. The effects of any commencement orders will appear -
the 'Type of effect' will be shown as 'Appointed Day' and there will be
an entry in the 'Notes' column confirming that the relevant instrument
is a commencement order relating to that legislation. For example, if
you wanted to know whether any provisions of the Railways and Transport
Safety Act 2003 (c.
20) were in force, you would type '2003' and '20' into the boxes for year
and number of affected legislation. Using the drop-down list for year
of affecting legislation for each of the years 2003 to 2007, you would
find five 'Appointed Day' orders (one in 2003, three in 2004, and one
in 2005). You would then need to take a note of the year and number of
each of those orders and then search for them on SLD using 'Quick search'.
Alternatively, you could use the SLD search facilities
to find any relevant commencement orders. Using either 'Quick search'
or 'Advanced search', type the name of the Act or other primary legislation
being commenced into the title field enclosed in double quotation marks
to obtain the exact phrase in the results (e.g., in the case mentioned
above, "Railways and Transport Safety Act 2003"). Select 'All
Secondary' from the drop-down list for 'Legislation type' and press 'Go'.
You should obtain a list of 'Matching legislation' containing any commencement
orders that have been made. In our example, we obtain a list containing
the five commencement orders made to date. You can then simply click on
the title of each of the orders to see the content.
The second method is probably the quickest and easiest. One caveat should be borne in mind: new secondary legislation, such as commencement orders, will usually be published to SLD within about two weeks of being made, but it can sometimes take up to four weeks depending on the demands on our resources at the time. It will then usually take a further few days (up to two weeks in some cases) for the effects of that new legislation to appear in the 'Tables of legislative effects'.
Where can I find legislation that is not on SLD?
Full details of the legislation held on SLD can be found in the Help section on ‘Types of Legislation held on SLD’. If the legislation is not held on SLD (e.g. pre-1991 statutory instruments or Local Acts, or Acts wholly repealed before the basedate) there are various possible ways of obtaining copies:
The Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) website carries all Public General Acts, in the form in which they were enacted, back to 1988. There are also many other Acts, both Public General and Local, from earlier years back to 1837. The OPSI site also carries statutory instruments back to 1987.
The OPSI site also carries a useful guide to the major collections of Local Acts at http://www.opsi.gov.uk/chron-tables/local/introduction-to-local-acts.htm (about a third of the way down the page).
You may be able to obtain a hard copy of legislation that is not on the OPSI site from The Stationery Office (TSO).
Finally, there is a very useful guide to finding legislation on the website of the Parliamentary Archives.
Can you help me to find the law on a particular subject?
We regret that we are unable to carry out any research on your behalf. SLD exists as an online resource enabling users to carry out their own research using the search facilities provided. You should bear in mind that the law on any given subject may be contained in many different statutes or statutory instruments and there may be other sources of relevant law, such as case law, that are not held on SLD. For example, you might want to know what the law is concerning ‘direct debits’ and searches on SLD using these terms produce no results. In fact, the law concerning direct debits is not directly governed by statute law at all – it is founded in the common law of contract and is mainly regulated by a non-statutory set of rules together with case law. Our staff do not have the legal knowledge to answer this sort of question and we do not have the resources to carry out the necessary research ourselves on users’ behalf. You may be able to obtain help in researching a legal subject in a law library.
Can you give me advice about a legal problem?
We regret that we are unable to provide you with any legal advice, not even advice concerning the correct interpretation of legislation. Our task is purely an editorial one. We do not have any sources of legal advice at our disposal and we do not have the resources to carry out the research that would be necessary to provide you with any advice. You may be able to obtain advice about your legal problem from a Citizens Advice Bureau.
How do I open a whole Act on SLD?
Once you have completed a search on SLD and have selected an item of legislation, you will be taken to the Results within legislation page. From this page you can open the legislation at any level by clicking on the appropriate entry in the contents list displayed. To open the whole Act, you should click on the Short Title, which appears at the very top of the list. But note that, if the Act is larger than 512 kilobytes you will get a message warning you that it may take some time to open. It is then recommended that you return to the ‘Results within legislation’ page and open the Act at a lower level. Very large Acts (larger than 2 megabytes) cannot be opened in their entirety at all and can only be opened at lower levels.
For further information on how legislation is structured on SLD and tips on opening and viewing legislation at different levels see Structure of Legislation.
Attributes are items of information attached to versions of legislation on SLD denoting properties of the legislative text. The main attributes denote geographical coverage (the ‘extent’ of the version) and currency (the ‘start’ and ‘end’ dates, if any, of the version). Attributes are shown in a table at the foot of the page of legislation on view.
For further information, see Attributes.
Annotations are notes that appear at the foot of a piece of legislative text on SLD. They are mainly used to provide the authority for amendments or other effects on the legislation, but they may also be used to convey other editorial information.
Each annotation has a reference number and the nature of the information it contains is conveyed by the annotation type. For instance, F-notes identify amendments where there is authority to change the text, and I-notes contain information about the coming into force of a provision.
For full details of annotation types and what they mean, see Annotation Types on SLD.