Citation footnotes (legislative history footnote)

SIs and SSIs often include references to other laws and regulations (such as Acts, other SIs or EU legislation). These references are accompanied by a footnote which provides the citation of the reference and its legislative history, showing how the referenced provision has been amended by other legislation over time.

These are known as ‘citation footnotes’ or ‘legislative history footnotes’.

In Lawmaker, you can automatically generate citation footnotes for any tagged external reference in an SI or SSI.

This feature uses data from http://legislation.gov.uk to generate footnotes that contain the citation of the external reference and summarised amendment history of the referenced provision.

The automatic generation of citation footnotes is still in beta as there are a number of edge cases that that may need further refinement in future. Subsequent versions of Lawmaker will update this feature and make it more robust.

How to generate a citation footnote

Before you can insert a citation footnote after a reference, you need to tag the reference (see References | How to “tag” references) so Lawmaker can identify the relevant provision on legislation.gov.uk.

Then, you can trigger the generation of a citation footnote in a number of ways:

Click on the tagged reference and then select Tools menu>Insert citation footnote,
Right-click on the tagged reference in the Editor and select Insert citation footnote, or
Click on the tagged reference and use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Shift+f

Lawmaker will extract the amendment information from http://legislation.gov.uk and generate the citation footnote.

If a footnote already exists for a reference and you insert a citation footnote, the original content of the footnote is preserved: the citation footnote will be inserted after the existing text.

Currently, it is only possible to generate one citation footnote at a time.

Once a footnote is generated you can edit it, for example to delete or summarise parts that are not relevant.

All the references generated within the citation footnote are tagged and link to http://legislation.gov.uk. You can view the provision referred to by double-clicking on the reference and selecting Goto ref on the floating toolbar. The page will open in a new tab.

What will a citation footnote include?

A citation footnote generated by Lawmaker will always begin with the citation of the legislative document, e.g. the SI year and number.

It will then include amending history information for the reference if the reference you are adding the footnote to refers to a specific provision or range of provisions. For example, if it refers to a section, regulation, article, rule (or lower level provision) such as "section 9 of the Companies Act 2006".

What is included depends on information available on legislation.gov.uk.

The structure of the footnote will be the following: citation+amended provision+amending history information

For instance: 2016 asp 22. Section 1 was amended by paragraph 11(2) of the Schedule to the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018.

2016 asp 22 is the citation of the reference,
Section 1 is the provision referred to which has been amended at some point,
paragraph 11(2) of the Schedule to the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 is the amendment history information relating to that provision.

The output of the citation footnote therefore will depend on the type of reference as shown in the summary table below

Reference type	Example of reference	Citation footnote output	Example of citation footnote output
Document reference	Companies Act 2006	Citation only	2006 c. 46.
Reference to a grouping level (e.g. to a Part, Chapter, Schedule, etc.)	Part 1 of the Companies Act 2006	Citation only	2006 c. 46.
Reference to a specific provision (e.g. to a section, regulation, article, or rule)	section 9 of the Companies Act 2006	Citation and amending history (when available)	2006 c. 46. Section 9 was amended by section 3(2)(a) and (b), 72(2), 29(2), 2(b) and (a) and 28(2) of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 and section 93(3) and (2)(a) and (b) of, and paragraph 4 of Schedule 3 to, the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015.

Which amendments are included in the footnote?

Lawmaker will include all amendments made to the section, regulation, rule etc. even if the reference is to a sub-provision within that section etc.

For example, if the external reference is "section 1(1)(a) of the Abusive Behaviour and Sexual Harm (Scotland) Act 2016" the footnote will present the amendment history information for section 1 (“2016 asp 22. Section 1 was amended by paragraph 11(2) of the Schedule to the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018”.

How is the amending history generated?

The amending history information is extracted from the textual amendment information available on legislation.gov.uk (also known as ‘F-notes' or 'footnotes’). Here is an example of how that information appears on the website:

More specifically - when generating a citation footnote - Lawmaker will first request the XML of the provision referred to from legislation.gov.uk, then it will extract all textual amendments from the XML, and finally it will convert each textual amendment into an amending statement which will be appended to the citation.

In order to do so, Lawmaker requires that the data provided by legislation.gov.uk follows a certain structure and format, which isn’t always the case. When the data deviates from the expected format, Lawmaker will consider it as unintelligible and will not be able to extract the information.

In this case, it will provide the following message in brackets within the citation footnote “(<Amended provision> has amendments that couldn't be processed when generating this footnote)”.

This means that textual amendments were found on legislation.gov.uk but it was not possible to process them and insert them into the citation footnote.

"Cannot generate citation footnote” message

This feature relies on the data from http://legislation.gov.uk to generate footnotes. Sometimes, http://legislation.gov.uk might be unresponsive due to server errors or other issues and therefore Lawmaker will not be able to retrieve the necessary information.

In this happens, when you try to add a citation footnote, you will see the error message “Cannot generate citation footnote. Unable to retrieve data from http://legislation.gov.uk ” and no citation footnote will be inserted in the Editor.

These issues with legislaton.gov.uk are often temporary, so you should try to generate the citation footnote again after a short time. If the problem persists then contact Lawmaker support.