The Act: Overview Overview Section 52: Expiry
195.This section will cause all the temporary measures in the schedule (apart from any that were expired earlier under section 53) to cease to have legal effect on the date stated in subsection (1). The expiry date is initially stated to be 30 November 2023.
196.Subsection (2) allows the Scottish Government to make regulations to push the expiry date back a year at a time, but they cannot push it back beyond 30 November 2025.
197.Subsection (3) requires the Government to review the operation of schedule provisions before they expire in order to decide whether to push their expiry date back; this duty does not apply ahead of provisions expiring in 2025 because the Government has no power to push expiry back beyond the end of November that year. Subsection (6) requires the Government to consult others as part of the review process.
198.The Government cannot make any regulations to push the expiry date back unless the Parliament approves them in draft first (see section 54). Section 52(7) further provides that when laying draft regulations before the Parliament for its approval, the Government also has to lay before the Parliament a statement explaining why it is seeking to push the expiry date back, the findings of its most recent review under subsection (3) and a summary of what consultation was carried out in undertaking that review.
199.Provisions of the schedule that expire will be subject to the same default statutory rules as they would were they repealed (see section 18, together with section 1(6), of the Interpretation and Legislative Reform (Scotland) Act 2010).