07 April
The government has invited members of the public, businesses and community organisations to give a boost to growth and personal freedoms by ripping through some of the red tape that is getting in their way.
The Prime Minister and Business Secretary Vince Cable have today launched the Red Tape Challenge initiative, supported by legislation.gov.uk. This initiative gives the public a chance to have their say on regulations that affect their businesses and everyday lives and to challenge regulations that are an unnecessary burden. Users can now freely and easily access the 21,000 regulations that are subject to this initiative from legislation.gov.uk.
The National Archives has worked with both the policy and new media teams at Number 10 to find the best way to access the legislation, allowing the de-regulation site to link directly through to custom-built results pages on legislation.gov.uk for each of the campaign's key 'themes'.
As the official home of UK legislation, Legislation.gov.uk had provided free and open access to all Secondary Legislation made from 1988 to date, but The National Archives collaborated with Thomson Reuters using Westlaw UK to obtain regulations preceding this that were still in force. Additional items of legislation were sourced and scanned from the library at The National Archives.
Around 4,000 additional files were contributed by Westlaw UK in electronic form, and extensive technical work was undertaken by our legislation service contractor TSO to convert them into the Crown Legislation Schema, so that they could be published on legislation.gov.uk in a compatible format.
Commenting on the project, Carol Tullo, Director of Information, Policy and Services, said: 'This is an example of collaboration between the legislation services team at The National Archives and outside partners, drawing on shared expertise. We will see a lot more of these exciting initiatives in the coming year as we look at new and creative ways to deliver more content and efficient services.'
See the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) website for regular updates on the project.
