{"id":940,"date":"2019-10-24T14:53:24","date_gmt":"2019-10-24T13:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.gov.scot\/digital-engagement\/?p=940"},"modified":"2019-10-25T12:18:27","modified_gmt":"2019-10-25T11:18:27","slug":"bill-drafting-digital-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gov.scot\/participation\/2019\/10\/24\/bill-drafting-digital-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"UEFA and civil partnerships bills drafted using digital tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do the UEFA European Championship and civil partnerships have in common? They’re recent bills being debated before becoming law. What’s interesting is that until now, bills have been drafted on paper. These are the first to be written using digital tools. It’s a move towards more open government.<\/em><\/p>\n

Guest blog from Matthew Lynch at the Parliamentary Counsel Office in Scotland who is leading this collaborative project modernising the way legislation is drafted. We\u2019re interested because it\u2019s a good example of putting users at the heart of any digital project. We wanted to share this story because it\u2019s an exciting development in building a more open government \u2013 using open data and open source where possible. It\u2019s also good to see people using new technology to work together across the UK.<\/p>\n

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In the last couple of weeks, the Scottish Parliament published three Bills: the UEFA European Championship Bill<\/a>,\u00a0the Solicitors\u00a0in\u00a0the Supreme\u00a0Courts of Scotland Bill<\/a> and the Civil Partnership Bill<\/a>. Nothing unusual about that, they publish Bills all the time. These bills will be debated and become law.<\/p>\n

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But, behind the scenes, these bills represent an exciting new stage for open data and open government in the UK.<\/p>\n

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I’m the project lead for the Legislative Drafting, Amending and Publishing Programme.\u00a0Our aim is to deliver new digital tools for the entire legislative lifecycle \u2013 from drafting, through the parliamentary amendment process, to publication. It\u2019s a joint project between Parliamentary Counsel Office in Scotland<\/a>, the Scottish Parliament, the UK Parliament, the Office of Parliamentary Counsel in London<\/a> and The UK National Archives.<\/p>\n

Those three Bills mentioned at the start are the first to be\u00a0drafted\u00a0and published using the new tools.<\/p>\n

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The challenge<\/strong><\/p>\n

The production of legislation is high profile and critical for parliaments and governments. Because of this, room for failure is small.\u00a0 Over\u00a0the\u00a0years, sophisticated, paper-based processes have evolved\u00a0to enable members of parliament to debate, scrutinise and change legislation.<\/p>\n

You probably know of legislation.gov.uk<\/a>. It contains all our enacted legislation. It\u2019s a great source of data which provides legislation in a searchable form and in numerous formats.<\/p>\n

But until now the process\u00a0leading\u00a0up\u00a0to\u00a0that final, enacted\u00a0legislation has been largely paper based.<\/p>\n

While digital tools are used, they vary between organisations and are mostly there to support the production of paper documents. Support and compatibility issues also means several of those tools are\u00a0 reaching the end of their life.<\/p>\n

Any\u00a0new, digital-centric tool\u00a0needs\u00a0to\u00a0be\u00a0able\u00a0to support and improve existing parliamentary processes. Satisfying all user needs around that could easily in a project with endless scope. So we’re focusing on building the core tools that allow you to draft and manage legislation as data. We see ourselves as developing a\u00a0new legislation platform on which others can build tools and apps for internal and external audiences.<\/p>\n

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The improvement plan<\/strong><\/p>\n

We set out to put the data and users first and to build a new toolset for authoring, amending and managing legislation from scratch. So what are we doing?<\/p>\n

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