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
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2022
Ariane Burgess
Do you have any more questions, Miles?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2022
Ariane Burgess
In that case, we will move to questions from Mark Griffin.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2022
Ariane Burgess
Thank you for that response and for giving us the term “tactical urbanism”; that is brilliant.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2022
Ariane Burgess
That was insightful. You have filled in some parts of the puzzle for me.
You talk about planning departments being pressed. Some of that comes from the right of recourse to appeals. Why do we have an appeal system? Developers can have a planning application refused but then take it to appeal. You are saying that constantly having to deal with that puts pressure on planning departments
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2022
Ariane Burgess
We have a few more questions from members, and about 20 minutes left in the session, so we should manage if we can all keep to the point.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2022
Ariane Burgess
Thank you, that was great. It was Elena Whitham who asked the question, but we are all interested, so we would be grateful if you could provide that to the committee. Thanks for pointing us to the United Cities and Local Governments charter as well—that is brilliant.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2022
Ariane Burgess
As part of our approach to NPF4, we will now consider the evidence that we have just heard in private.
12:33 Meeting continued in private until 12:52.Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2022
Ariane Burgess
We have lots of questions, so I will go to Christina Gaiger and then Barbara Cummins, who has not spoken yet. If we have time, I will try to bring Robbie Calvert back in. However, I would like to move on.
09:45Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2022
Ariane Burgess
Welcome back. We will continue to take evidence as part of the scrutiny of NPF4. I welcome our second panel of witnesses: Dr Caroline Brown is a lecturer in environmental planning and healthy environments at Heriot-Watt University; Professor Cliff Hague is emeritus professor of planning and spatial development at Heriot-Watt University, and chair of the Cockburn Association; and Professor Leigh Sparks is deputy principal and professor of retail studies at the institute for retail studies at the University of Stirling.
Thank you for joining us. We have already had a rich evidence session with the previous panel and are looking forward to hearing from you. We will move straight to questions. We tend to direct our questions to one person initially, but if any other witnesses want to come in,?they should please put an R in the chat function. If we start to run out of time, witnesses may be asked to come to a point to ensure that all questions are answered.
I will kick off with the first question, which I will direct to Dr Caroline Brown first.? The draft NPF4 represents a significant shift in national planning policy, with a new focus on issues of place, liveability, wellbeing and emissions reduction. Will the Scottish planning system be able to deliver those ambitious outcomes?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2022
Ariane Burgess
Before I bring in Ailsa Macfarlane I will add to my questions. We have a couple of national policies that focus on climate and nature restoration. I would like to get a sense of whether you believe that the goals for climate change and emission reductions in the draft framework are achievable and consistent with other policies that are in it. I ask Ailsa Macfarlane to respond to my first question about whether the planning system is set up to deliver the outcomes and to give her thoughts on the climate emission reductions piece.