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 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ 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
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Ariane Burgess
Agenda item 2 is to take evidence on the legislative consent memorandum for the United Kingdom Government’s Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill. We are joined, in the committee room, by Craig McLaren, who is director of the Royal Town Planning Institute Scotland. We are joined remotely by Jim Miller, who is the chair of Heads of Planning Scotland, and Liz Hamilton, who is the head of planning at Homes for Scotland. I warmly welcome you all to the meeting.
We have just a few questions, so the meeting might not take all that long. We will focus particularly on the planning data aspect of the LCM. I am interested to hear, from your perspective, whether Scottish planning authorities’ handling of data was raised as an issue with the Scottish Government during the engagement that preceded the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019. If so, at that point, what concerns did you highlight and how did the Scottish Government respond? I will start with Craig McLaren, because he is in the room.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Ariane Burgess
That is great. Does Liz Hamilton want to come in on the question about planning and asking the Scottish Government about it?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Ariane Burgess
Agenda item 3 is consideration of a piece of subordinate legislation. Because the instrument is subject to the negative procedure, there is no requirement for the committee to make any recommendation on it.
Do members have any comments?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Ariane Burgess
Does anyone else wish to comment on the NPF4 aspects?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Ariane Burgess
Does the planning data cover just the built environment? I am very interested in spatial planning. I feel that, at the moment, we in Scotland do not know how it affects land use, for example. So many critical issues are crunching up against each other, including biodiversity response, renewable energy and housing. All those things are making demands for similar or the same spaces. If we capture that data through the programme that you mentioned, will that help us to understand how we could use our land more appropriately?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 October 2022
Ariane Burgess
Thank you very much. That is very useful information. I am so glad that we are having this conversation.
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ariane Burgess
I understand that the fleet of the enforcement arm of Marine Scotland—Marine Scotland compliance—is composed of just three vessels. I am also aware of stakeholders’ concerns that Marine Scotland’s enforcement of marine regulations is underfunded, of the many instances of illegal fishing that are going on unchecked due to a lack of enforcement capacity, and that enforcement officers undertook industrial action earlier this year.
Given that work is being taken forward on inshore fisheries through the Bute house agreement, is increasing enforcement capacity a priority for the Scottish Government? Do you expect there to be increased funding in the budget for the coming year? If not, how will enforcement be improved?
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ariane Burgess
Is any consideration being given to increasing the size of the vessels, given that we have such a vast amount of water to cover and that stakeholders are raising concerns?
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ariane Burgess
In relation to the good food nation, the Government has estimated that the proposed Scottish food commission will cost about £1 million per year to run. We would be interested in hearing the timescale for establishing the commission and any details that you have on its coming into existence.
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 5 October 2022
Ariane Burgess
I was just about to ask the cabinet secretary about how involved she is in the remote, rural and islands housing action plan. Do you collaborate with the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government on that?