The legislative document relating to the external reference _______ could not be located on Legislation.gov.uk . This may be because the document doesn't exist yet or because there is a typo in the name.

Description

This warning alerts you to any external references which Lawmaker was unable to associate with a relevant document on legislation.gov.uk after you have tagged references.

When using the automatic tagging feature, Lawmaker will parse the text of any references which appear in the text of your document and attempt to add links to relevant provisions of documents published on legislation.gov.uk.

For this automatic tagging process to work, the reference text in your document must match exactly the title of the referenced documents as they appear on legislation.gov.uk.

Any differences will result in the reference failing to tag. This includes differences in:

• Spelling

• Capitalisation

• Punctuation (e.g., hyphens)

• Spacing

• Year

Note that this document check may also arise if you have text in your document that looks like the title of a piece of legislation, but isn’t actually (yet) a legislative document on legislation.gov.uk. See How to fix below.

For example, Secondary Legislation will often refer to its own title in a ‘citation’ provision. If you attempt to 'tag' this in a document that has not yet been made law, Lawmaker will fail to find it on legislation.gov.uk and will therefore raise this document check.

Example

For example, a reference to the “Human Rights Act 1999” will be flagged as an erroneous reference because the year is wrong. Likewise a reference to the “Human Rights act 1998” will be flagged as an erroneous reference because the word ‘act’ is not capitalised. A reference to the “Human Rights Act 1998” will be tagged successfully.

How to fix

Fixing this issue should be simple.

If you do intend to have an external reference, you should:

• First check that there are no obvious typos, incorrect capitalisation, incorrect punctuation or additional spaces;

• Find the document you are seeking to reference on legislation.gov.uk and ensure there are no differences between the official title of the legislation and what you have in your document.

If you do not want to have an external reference (i.e., Lawmaker has incorrectly identified some text as a reference and you want to remove the grey highlighting and the document warning), you should:

• Right-click on the reference and select Ignore reference from the menu; or

• Double-click on the reference and select Mark as ignored from the floating toolbar.

Ignoring the reference will remove the document check and the highlighting. It will also prevent the text from being incorrectly tagged as a reference again. Ignored text will be marked up with underlining, as in the screenshot below.