Historians of modern Wicca generally treat the 1951 repeal as a necessary precondition for the movement's emergence into public view, since Gerald Gardner, already initiated and developing his own coven and ritual material by his own account since 1939, did not begin publishing openly about witchcraft under conditions of legal safety until after the old Witchcraft Act had been removed from the statute book. Within a few years of the repeal, Gardner began giving interviews to the British press and, in 1954, published Witchcraft Today, the book most historians credit with launching Wicca as a publicly known religious movement.
The repeal's significance lies specifically in what it removed rather than in what it actively enabled: British law after 1951 did not grant witchcraft or Wicca any positive legal recognition or protection as a religion, a status that would take further decades and, in other countries including the United States, separate legal processes to establish more fully. What the repeal did accomplish was to end the specific criminal liability that had made any public claim to witchcraft practice, however framed, a prosecutable offense in Britain.
The timing between the 1951 repeal and Gardner's subsequent public activity is close enough that most historians of the movement, including Ronald Hutton, treat the connection as more than coincidental, reading Gardner's publishing timeline as a direct response to the removal of the specific legal risk the old Act had posed.