The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
There are two types of keyword search:
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
If you search by an individual session, the list of 成人快手 and committees will automatically update to show only the 成人快手 and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of 成人快手 and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of 成人快手 and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 3527 contributions
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 September 2023
Audrey Nicoll
Lynn Brown, I will come to you next, if you want to add anything to what we have already heard.
10:15Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 September 2023
Audrey Nicoll
A very good morning, and welcome to the 21st meeting in 2023 of the Criminal Justice Committee. We have apologies from Sharon Dowey.
Our first item of business is to welcome John Swinney to his first formal meeting of the Criminal Justice Committee. Sharon Dowey will attend her first meeting next week, because she has a prior commitment in London with the Public Audit Committee. I look forward to working with them both, and I repeat our thanks to Jamie Greene and Collette Stevenson, whom they replace.
I invite John Swinney to declare any interests that are relevant to the committee鈥檚 remit.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 September 2023
Audrey Nicoll
I will bring in DCC Connors in a second. David Page, is there anything that you want to add?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 September 2023
Audrey Nicoll
DCC Connors, I come to you now.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 September 2023
Audrey Nicoll
I will now bring in Pauline McNeill, followed by John Swinney.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 September 2023
Audrey Nicoll
Thank you. I will bring in Rona Mackay and then Katy Clark.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 September 2023
Audrey Nicoll
Eric, you mentioned white vans earlier, and I know that a joint decision has been made, albeit on a temporary basis, to set time limits in order to avoid late-night sittings in custody courts. Obviously that is very welcome for lawyers and court staff in particular, but has any modelling been done on the impact of that? My immediate thought is that it might just create a backlog of cases that are not being dealt with in the evening hours.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 September 2023
Audrey Nicoll
That was a really helpful update.
Finally, I want to ask about the process of transferring information such as police reports, evidence and so on, from the police to the Crown Office. Forgive me if this has been covered in earlier responses, but I think that it is a welcome part of transformation and reform. I am therefore curious about whether you have any update on that work, particularly in the context of the potential budget implications for the Crown Office.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 September 2023
Audrey Nicoll
Yes.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 September 2023
Audrey Nicoll
No, no鈥攊t is fine.