Summary

  • Launched in July 2010, legislation.gov.uk joined original and revised legal texts, with an API for reuse.
  • By 2012–13, the work behind the website included 128,648 outstanding changes and a programme bringing outside contributors into the editing effort.

Parliament is an excellent supplier of unfinished website work. It changes a provision; somewhere, an editor has to find the earlier provision, establish when and where the change applies, and put the revised text in front of a reader. In Britain's 2013 open-government plan, the arithmetic was unusually frank: legislatures produced around 15,000 changes a year, while The National Archives had resources to apply 10,000 in-house. The statute book had acquired a web address. Its maintenance department had acquired a queue.

The launch itself was substantial. The National Archives' 2010–11 annual report records the July 2010 opening of legislation.gov.uk, bringing together thousands of documents from statutelaw.gov.uk and opsi.gov.uk. The former supplied revised legislation; the latter supplied texts as enacted. Readers could reach the collection free, and developers could get at its underlying data through an API.

A law arrives with homework

The January 2012 editorial guide explains the work concealed by that tidy front door. A new Act appeared in its enacted form shortly after enactment. Editors then analysed its effects on other legislation, recorded commencement and geographical information, and assembled the changes for the site's tracking facility. The heavier job followed: carrying those effects into the older text and adding the appropriate annotations.

Some effects changed words. Others changed how a provision applied without altering its wording. A simple search-and-replace operation would have enjoyed a short and disastrous career. Dates, territorial reach and the authority for a change all belonged with the text. The guide also described notices at the top of an affected page identifying changes still awaiting incorporation. The website let readers see something of its unfinished work.

By the 2012–13 annual report, the queue had a precise recorded size: 128,648 outstanding effects. Each effect was an individual change made by one piece of legislation to another, with a set of editorial tasks attached. The figure covered post-2002 changes still awaiting application to the online text. It counted work to do, one awkward legal dependency at a time.

Borrowing more elbows

The National Archives had begun widening the workforce. Its 2011–12 report described the Expert Participation Programme as a way to resource maintenance with private-sector contributions. The following report credited the collaboration with researching and capturing information on around 100,000 changes. Separately, it marked a target to apply 20,000 outstanding effects through the programme as achieved. Researching a change prepared the job; incorporating it completed another stage.

The 2013 action plan made the programme a main route towards bringing revised primary legislation up to date by the end of 2015. That was the target the government set. The annual capacity figures explained why extra help mattered: the institution needed to tackle old work while new work kept arriving.

This is a particularly useful episode in internet history because the launch photographs would have missed the main machine. Free access, a single address and reusable data made the law easier to fetch. The enduring service depended on people tracing changes through a crowded statute book. Parliament could always supply another amendment. Somebody still had to do the filing.