It is our aim to present the revised text of legislation clearly and accurately without gloss or comment. We will give authority for changes to the text, and record any other effects that make some difference to the meaning, scope or application of the legislation. But otherwise, we aim to let the legislation speak for itself precisely as the legislature has framed it.
Additional editorial information is used only sparingly, generally either to explain our presentation of the text where necessary or to draw attention to some difficulty in the reading of the text arising from the way in which it has been amended. Whilst we avoid interpretation as far as possible, we accept that an element of interpretation is often called for in deciding whether or how one piece of legislation affects another.
When we receive a new piece of legislation, a newly enacted Act for example, the first thing we do is to analyse it carefully to identify all its impacts on other legislation. These are mostly amendments to the text of the other legislation, but there are also many effects that do not change the text, such as when the other legislation is said to be ‘applied’ or ‘modified’.
At this point, we also note certain other information about the new legislation, such as when it comes into force and its geographical extent. This will be used in setting the attributes of the legislation and its provisions. Once these attributes have been set, and any annotations needed at this stage about commencement or extent have been inserted, the new legislation is deployed to the website.
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Local Acts of the UK Parliament very rarely specify any geographic extent, so they will nearly always be assigned an extent of ‘UK’, even though they may relate only to a small local area. The ‘start dates’ of Local Acts are set to the Royal Assent date, unless some other date is specified in the Act itself. Thus, we do not reflect the ‘prospective’ status of any provisions that are not brought into force by the Act itself. This is because we do not revise Local Acts, and so the effects of any later commencing instruments or events will not be recorded on SLD. Note also that the attributes of secondary legislation are not set as part of the editorial process. They are set automatically when the legislation is loaded. For information about the basis on which these attributes are assigned, see the relevant topics in Attributes. |
As soon as the analysis of the legislation is complete, the extracted information about its effects on other legislation is tabulated. This is then added to the Tables of legislative effects that can be found on the website. This information also serves as a guide for the editor in the next stage of the process.
The bulk of the editorial work consists of carrying through the effects of the new legislation into the affected legislation by editing the text and adding appropriate annotations using a set of computer-based editing tools. This work necessarily takes rather longer than the initial processes. You will be notified whenever you access an item of legislation on the website if there are any effects in the Tables of legislative effects that have not yet been applied to it (but see also the important information in Update status of legislation).
The following topics describe the kinds of annotations that are added by editors to the text of revised legislation and the editorial conventions that determine how those annotations are framed. For further information about the appearance of amended text, see Presentation of text.
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