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Meeting the Legal Information Challenge of EU Exit

This article explores how EU legislation currently applies to the UK and the changes that will occur post-Brexit, including the role of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 and the publication of relevant instruments. It also discusses the objectives of supporting departments, ensuring legal certainty, and data conversion.

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Meeting the Legal Information Challenge of EU Exit

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  1. Meeting the Legal Information Challenge of EU Exit Matthew Bell & Clare Allison Legislation Services

  2. Introduction to legislation.gov.uk

  3. The National Archives The Legislation Services Team at The National Archives: • Maintains and Operates legislation.gov.uk, the official public source of UK legislation • Supports legislation drafters, providing the SI Template drafting tool, registering new SI’s, and a publishing system for all new UK legislation • Produces revised legislation, updating all Primary legislation from across the UK, and recently begun revising Secondary legislation

  4. How EU Legislation Currently Applies to the UK

  5. S.2(1) ECA 1972 Treaties S.2(2) Other Acts Directives NI UK W S Statutory Instruments and Statutory Rules UK implementing legislation Regulations Decisions Directly Applicable European Legislation Tertiary Legislation

  6. s.1 The European Communities Act 1972 is repealed on exit day. legislating The EXIT: the European UNION (WithdrawAL) ACT 2018

  7. S.1 S.2(1) EUWA 2018 ECA 1972 Treaties S.2(2) Other Acts Directives NI UK W S Statutory Instruments and Statutory Rules UK implementing legislation Regulations Decisions Directly Applicable European Legislation Tertiary Legislation

  8. S.1 EUWA 2018 ECA 1972 Treaties Other Acts Directives NI UK W S Statutory Instruments and Statutory Rules UK implementing legislation Regulations Decisions Directly Applicable European Legislation Tertiary Legislation

  9. S.1 EUWA 2018 ECA 1972 Treaties S.3 S.2 Other Acts Directives NI UK W S S.4 Statutory Instruments and Statutory Rules Regulations Regulations Treaties Decisions Decisions Incorporated Direct European Legislation Tertiary Legislation Tertiary Legislation

  10. EUWA 2018 ECA 1972 Treaties S.8-9 Other Acts Directives NI UK W S Statutory Instruments and Statutory Rules An estimated 800 new Statutory Instruments making an unknown number of amendments across the statute book Regulations Regulations Treaties Decisions Decisions Tertiary Legislation Tertiary Legislation

  11. Ex-EU Reg. UK Amendment EU Reg. EU Amendment EU Reg. Current Post Exit

  12. legislating for a transition?

  13. EUWA 2018 EUWAA 2018 ECA 1972 Treaties Other Acts Directives NI UK W S Statutory Instruments and Statutory Rules UK implementing legislation Regulations Decisions Directly Applicable European Legislation Some modifying Statutory Instruments? Some Incorporated Direct European Legislation? Tertiary Legislation

  14. In either case, our mission

  15. European Union (Withdrawal) Act, Sch. 5 para.1 (1) The Queen’s printer mustmake arrangements for the publication of— (a) each relevant instrument that has been published before exit day by an EU entity, and (b) the relevant international agreements. (2) In this paragraph— “relevant instrument” means— (a) an EU regulation, (b) an EU decision, and (c) EU tertiary legislation; and “relevant international agreements” means— (a) the Treaty on European Union, (b) the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, (c) the Euratom Treaty, and (d) the EEA agreement.

  16. European Union (Withdrawal) Act, Sch. 5 para.1 (3) The Queen’s printer may make arrangements for the publication of— (a) any decision of, or expression of opinion by, the European Court, or (b) any other document published by an EU entity. (4) The Queen’s printer may make arrangements for the publication of anything which the Queen’s printer considers may be useful in connection with anything published under this paragraph. (5) This paragraph does not require the publication of— (a) anything repealed before exit day, or (b) any modifications made on or after exit day.

  17. EUWA 2018 ECA 1972 Treaties Other Acts to implement withdrawal Other Acts Directives Directions about what not to publish NI UK W S Statutory Instruments and Statutory Rules 800 new Statutory Instruments Regulations Regulations Treaties Decisions Decisions Scope of new documents to publish Tertiary Legislation Tertiary Legislation

  18. Objectives • Support departments in their preparation and policy making, including legislating pre- and post-exit • Fulfil the Queen’s Printer’s new duties, ensuring he meets his obligations for publishing the retained EU law as currently set out in the EU (Withdrawal) Act 2018 • Aid legal certainty, post-exit, with up-to-date content on legislation.gov.uk, for service users and data re-users

  19. Data conversion to a newly extended version of the UK’s format for legislation

  20. The SI Template

  21. Deciding what to publish • What is a Regulation? Not as easy as you’d think! • There are many 100,000s of documents • EU legislation data can be accessed either via EUR-Lex API or the CELLAR via SPARQL • 6 methods of categorising EU documents, all giving different document totals • The categories are not consistent, and 1 document can be given more than one classification • At least 16 flavours of “Regulation” • What is “Tertiary” legislation?

  22. For example… • EUR-Lex has categorised this as “Complementary Legislation” • Title and type indicate that it is a Regulation • You have to know quite a lot about the law to decide

  23. What we are publishing where

  24. EUR-Lex Web Archive • What have we done? • Created a comprehensive archive of the EUR-Lex website for the following sectors: Treaties (sector 1); International Agreements (sector 2); Legislation (sector 3); Complementary legislation (sector 4); Case-law (sector 6); Consolidated acts (sector 0); Other - Official Journal C series (sector C); EFTA documents (sector E), in English, French and German • How’s it going? • Phase 1 complete, with 11.7 million resources archived; 786.4 GB (compressed) in size • What’s next? • Phase 2 (Oct-Dec ‘18) -> repeat the process for new or updated content; then daily incremental capture of new content (Jan-Mar ‘19) • Providing search and querying facilities • Providing public access

  25. Web archiving EUR-Lex • Comprehensive archive of EUR-Lex for Exit Day • A backstop and a source for provenance of the data on legislation.gov.uk • Capturing the following sectors: • Treaties (sector 1) • International Agreements (sector 2) • Legislation (sector 3) • Complementary legislation (sector 4) • Case-law (sector 6) • Consolidated acts (sector 0) • Other documents published in the Official Journal C series (sector C) • EFTA documents (sector E) • All statuses (in force, no longer in force) • Variety of formats (PDF, HTML etc) including XML, in English, French and German • Complete capture of the Official Journal of the European Union

  26. Editing retained EU Law

  27. Approach: Publishing Effects to EU Legislation • Adapted existing editorial guidance and system to record effects to the EU legislation and those made by Ministerial Directions. • New effects are already available on the Changes to Legislation pages: • Once the EU legislation is published the effects will appear in newly designed status warning messages

  28. Approach: Editing the EU legislation • Once the effects come into force we will use our editorial system to create new versions of the EU retained legislation. • Our aim will be to clearly display amendments before and after Exit Day.

  29. Tracking new EU Exit legislation

  30. Proposed Negative SIs

  31. Editorial Progress – EU Amendments • 44 EU Exit SIs made and published –Over 1000 amendments • 188 amendments already identified to EU Regulations and Decisions – and published on Changes to Legislation • 88 more in Draft (at least), with an estimated 9000 amendments! • Updating UK Implementing SIs – 450 complete to date

  32. Legal Certainty – Meeting User Needs

  33. We know our users

  34. User Research: Understanding User Needs Whats an Implementation Period? How do I find EU Law now? What is Retained EU law? Does this law apply to me? Is this law up to date? I thought we’d left, what is this? Why Can’t I just use EUR-Lex?

  35. User Survey Results

  36. User Survey Results

  37. Findings from user research • The timelines are very important - they aid understanding and help to ‘tell the story’ of a piece of legislation through EU Exit • Timelines can convey quite difficult concepts in a simple way e.g. during an implementation period • However, prospective versions are not very important for users (and introduce lots of misunderstanding too) • The ‘understanding legislation’ area tested really well • Grouping EU legislation together (and the UK legislation relating to EU Exit) is useful for many users • The ‘Explore legislation’ area, grouping legislation in different ways e.g EU, UK from EU Withdrawal Act etc, tested well • We will need to differentiate between EU and UK amendments

  38. Benefits: improved navigation, table of contents

  39. Benefits: flexible reading levels (for Articles, Chapters, Annexes, whole document etc)

  40. Amendments marked in text with annotations giving authority for the amendment

  41. Benefits: flexible paginated content for easy printing and reading

  42. Timelines to “tell the story”

  43. Any Questions?

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