This has been an endemic problem not just for the public but for practitioners and the courts. In a Court of Appeal case in 2008, barristers had relied upon legislation downloaded from the official government website, only for it to be spotted as the court was ready to give judgment that the legislation was out of date and no longer applied. The court condemned as ‘lamentable’ the position that ‘there is no comprehensive statute law database with hyperlinks which would enable an intelligent person, by using a search engine, to find out all the legislation on a particular topic.
