UK Statute Law Database - New Statute Law Database

New Statute Law Database

In December 2008 the Statute Law Database team transferred to The National Archives. This meant that the responsibility for the OPSI and SLD websites became the responsibility of one department. A major consideration of the transfer was to enable the rationalisation of the two websites in order to provide one point of access to all UK legislation and in doing so reduce duplication in effort, increase efficiency (for example taking advantage of technological developments to streamline processes) and provide a more user friendly and accessible service across the board. Since December 2008 a considerable amount of work to look at who the customers of the joint services are and look carefully at their requirements. The resulting service is quite different from the Statute Law Database and it might take some time to get used to but overall the new site should provide a far better service than the existing sites.

The content of the new Statute Law Database consists of the combined content of the previous UK Statute Law Database (SLD), and the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) website,. Updated legislation on the new website is the same data as that available on SLD. The only exceptions are a few Acts that are currently being updated by the editorial team that are available on SLD but will not be available on the new site until the revisions are complete and they are ready to be published to SLD and the new website. Many of the revised documents held by SLD are also available in the OPSI dataset as an “as enacted” version. The new website combines these so you can switch between the different versions.

Users of SLD might be particularly interested in the following aspects of the new site:

• For the majority of revised legislation now held the ‘as enacted’ and ‘revised’ version. The different versions can be accessed via the buttons in the ‘What Version’ area on the Table of Contents.
• ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ buttons are now available when navigating the content of legislation (this has only been made possible because of the way the legislation is held on the new site).
• ‘Change to Legislation’ – A lot of work has been done in order to make the revised legislation as usable as possible despite the fact it is not fully up to date. The development of the new site has allowed us to take the ‘Tables of Legislative Effects’ information currently published on SLD and incorporate the ‘unapplied effects’ into the content of the legislation at provision level. This means that instead of having to look through the ‘Tables of Effects’ year by year in order to establish the current position of a piece of legislation you can access all the outstanding effects when viewing the Act. The outstanding effects also include links to the affecting legislation meaning that you can view the amendments more easily too.
• Links in annotations – all annotations giving authority for amendments that have been applied now contain links to the affecting legislation (on SLD will only be able to do this for amendments carried out post 2002.)
• Probably one of the main areas of difference from SLD is that the ‘attributes’ information have been removed from the foot of the provisions in order to make it more meaningful to users. The ‘geographical extent’ can now be turned on and off using the ‘show geographical extent’ button and the ‘start date’ information is now presented on the ‘Timeline of Changes’ so as to give the ability to navigate through the legislation at specific points in time.