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 ˿ and committees will automatically update to show only the ˿ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ˿ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ˿ 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 5744 contributions
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 7 December 2022
Ariane Burgess
I will not take an intervention.
I think that the imperative is to ensure that the legislation, when it is passed, does not allow exceptions to become loopholes, which would undermine our intention to uphold animal welfare standards. For those reasons, I will not support amendments 58 to 62.
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 7 December 2022
Ariane Burgess
I will pick up on the point about mink. The mink projects in Scotland do not use dogs, and the mink population should be controlled under the environmental benefit exception.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Ariane Burgess
Item 2 is to take evidence on the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman’s “Annual Report 2021-22”. We are joined by Rosemary Agnew, who is our ombudsman; Niki Maclean, who is the SPSO’s director; and Andrew Sheridan, who is the SPSO’s head of improvement, standards and engagement. I welcome our witnesses. Before we move to questions from members, I invite Rosemary Agnew to make a short opening statement.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Ariane Burgess
Thank you very much. It was good to hear your opening statement and have you flag up the increasing complexity of legislation and the workloads that I imagine might come out of that.
You closed with the piece about complaints. It is good to hear that you do more than work on complaints, but I would like to focus on complaints. The committee would be interested to hear about the 17 per cent increase in public service complaints that the ombudsman received between 2020-21 and 2021-22, as noted in our papers. You touched on that a little. Will you expand on the reasons for that increase? Have new trends been identified in the recent case figures?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Ariane Burgess
That certainly is good news. I definitely agree that the direction of travel is right. The committee discovered on your website that the waiting time was 10 months last week and that it is nine months this week. As you said, if we were at the end of this week, it would be eight months. We wonder about that. If people see on the website that the waiting time is nine or eight months, could that deter them from complaining? Is there a way to parse that a bit more so that people understand it? Does the website have something that allows people to understand that there is a fast-track process so that, in a good number of cases, the period can be 12 weeks?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Ariane Burgess
Thanks for that. I will now bring in my colleagues.
I am sorry—I think that Willie Coffey has a quick supplementary first.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Ariane Burgess
I call Willie Coffey, who has a number of questions.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Ariane Burgess
I was interested in your comment that it might be time for a refresh of the model complaints handling approach.
I call Paul McLennan.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Ariane Burgess
It is useful to hear that there is a potential route. Is there anything other than the human rights bill that could result in your getting the powers in this parliamentary session?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Ariane Burgess
Thank you. It is helpful to hear about the direction of travel for child-friendly complaints and about the complexity and your concern about the impact on the people who use the services. Thank you so much for coming in today—it was good to hear the evidence and to get clarity on some of the details.
I suspend the meeting for five minutes before we move on to our next item of business.
10:34 Meeting suspended.