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Contracts

The Queen’s Printer for Scotland issues a contract to the private sector for the provision of a range of editorial, printing, publishing, distribution and dissemination services to support its role in relation to the publication of Scottish legislation and associated products. Details of the current contract are detailed below.

Whenever contracts are due to be re-tendered details will generally be advertised in the Official Journal of the European Union and published on this website.

Current Contract

Contractor	Date awarded	Expiry date
The Stationery Office Ltd (TSO)	01 October 2005	31 December 2009 (with an option to extend for one year)

The contract covers the provision of a range of services in relation to the production, publication and dissemination of Scottish legislation including:

a. the provision of printing and binding services for the printed publications including the development and maintenance of appropriate templates to be used in the drafting of Scottish Statutory Instruments;

b. the provision of publishing, bibliographic, storage, distribution and sales services in respect of the following publications:

• Acts of the Scottish Parliament
• Explanatory Notes to Acts of the Scottish Parliament
• Scottish Statutory Instruments
• Executive Notes to Scottish Statutory Instruments
• Annual Bound Volumes of Acts of the Scottish Parliament
• Annual Bound Editions of Scottish Statutory Instruments; and

c. the provision of a range of electronic data services including hosting and development of the OQPS website (www.oqps.gov.uk) the encoding of new text, the loading of pages to the website and the provision of electronic data to authorised users in appropriate formats (including XML, PDF and HTML).

Legislation Contract Tendering

Over the next year we will be running a competition to award contracts to produce and publish legislation on behalf of the Scottish Government.

On 30 November 2009 we gave a briefing to the potential supplier community on the separate inter-related technical requirements of official legislation publishing and the current business model. The event was hosted by Intellect, the UK trade association for the IT, telecoms and electronics industries (see www.intellectuk.org) and over 40 publishing and technology companies attended. Intellect also facilitated sessions to bring together potential suppliers who may be interested in supplying contract services, but to do so, would need to work in partnership with other suppliers.

Delegates received this information pack:

• legislation publishing briefing presentation (PDF - 4 MB)
• information on publishing processes data inputs and outputs (PDF - 250 KB)
• information on publishing volumes (PDF - 153 KB)
• list of legislative products produced under the contracts (PDF - 72 KB)
• personae information on users that access legislation from the OPSI and Statute Law Database websites (PDF - 244 KB)

A summary of the questions and issues raised by delegates, and our responses can be also be downloaded:

• Questions and Answer session summary (PDF - 141 KB)

We will also make available additional technologies, information and data used to produce legislation. Potential bidders will be able to access these and experiment with new approaches. This information will be accessible on our website.

Information already available includes:

• Crown XML Schema for legislation. This is a reference source for those with an interest in data standards for legislation.
• Information on secondary legislation production processes

We would like to thank all those who have already shown interest in the original competition and hope that they will benefit from the additional information provided. Respondees to the original notice will need to re-respond to the re-issued notice.