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Drifting over drafts

Today, I’m looking for this draft Statutory Instrument:

The Offshore Chemicals (Amendment) Regulations 2011 (oh yes, I know how to live life on the wild side!)

The Stationery Office gave notice of its existence here.

Now, I want to put that information into our Current Awareness service, so I went to the section in OPSI that I’d previously bookmarked, as it held draft SIs.

But that redirected me to the front page of Legislation.gov.uk.

Ok…I knew that the shift of all content to Legislation.gov would be happening soon, so that was fine. Legislation.gov is generally a good, handy site…but unfortunately it still has some glitches.

Before, on OPSI, I could either go directly to the Draft SIs page, or search by the title of the draft. For some reason though, Legislation.gov doesn’t recognise draft legislation if you try and find it via entering its title in the search box – it seems that search is restricted to only enacted legislation, so Draft SIs aren’t findable that way.

Ok…I can go to the Draft SIs page, and find it there. Or not – there are only 15 draft SIs so far for 2011, it’s easy enough to see that my one isn’t there. It looks like, in the case of this SI, there ain’t no 2011 version…so I’ll go and check if there’s a typing error been made somewhere, and it’s really meant to be the 2010 they’re referring to. Now…where’s the 2010 one?

The 2010 draft SI section is split into 12 pages. There’s no option to show them all on a single page, so if you’re unsure of exactly what it’s been categorised under, you’re going to be clicking through each page, unless you know what exact heading your draft SI could be found under…no quick “find” option, just scanning each heading and entry.

For this one, after clicking through various pages, I found that it’s listed under the “Environmental Protection” category. Now, I don’t know the Legislation.gov headings – therefore I couldn’t tell whether my SI would be listed under Chemicals, Offshore, Utilities, Health and Safety, or any other possible headings. Making me search by a heading, when I don’t know what the headings are, nor whether the SI I’m looking for will be categorised by them under that heading isn’t very helpful! If they can categorise the headings alphabetically, why can’t they categorise the draft SIs alphabetically? After all, usually I have the title of the SI, and want to be able to find it from that: I don’t really care where they decide to place it within their categories.

So, from the information on the Draft SIs page, I now know that what I'm looking for is a draft that replaces a previous draft, which itself was a replacement of a previous draft.

Unfortunately, the Daily List entry makes clear that the 2011 draft is replacing the second 2010 draft…but the 2011 one draft is nowhere to be found.

Gah!

So, basically, my brain is melted, and I’m glaring at the Legislation.gov website, for making what used to be a simple process into a multi-step pain, and am still no closer to knowing the proper title for these draft Regulations, or where they are.

Excuse me while I go to a quiet place to whimper for a while.

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