Mick Antoniw MS, Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution
When I laid The Future of Welsh Law programme before the Senedd last year, I made clear that one of the key projects to improve the accessibility of Welsh law was to ensure users can access our laws in up-to-date form in both languages on legislation.gov.uk.
Before this month there have been technological and other barriers to that happening. But I am pleased to announce that these have been overcome, and I am very grateful to The National Archives for their work to develop new functionality on their editorial system. This will enable the Welsh Government to take over much of the process to update the text of our laws bilingually.
Since 1999, 74 Acts and Measures have been enacted and nearly 6,000 Statutory Instruments have been made. These statutes have been amended and changed over time both by our own legislation and that of the UK Parliament. Despite the work of legislation.gov.uk to reflect these changes, there are currently about 46,000 outstanding effects and annotations to be recorded and published on legislation.gov.uk to enable our laws to be accessed in their up-to-date form.
We will now be starting the work to tackle that backlog, initially focusing on Acts and Measures passed by the Senedd, before moving on to Welsh Statutory Instruments. I will keep Members updated on our progress.
This is a major step towards ensuring that in future, all Welsh legislation will be available, fully updated in both languages, soon after it is amended.