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 2015 contributions
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 8 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Energy Action Scotland’s written submission notes that the winter heating payment
“provides less impact on fuel poverty than the benefit it replaces”.
In addition to what you have said about the geographical impacts, Frazer, can you expand on that point so that we have an understanding of the gaps in addressing fuel poverty that this version of the payment creates?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 8 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
I appreciate that.
I have a quick question for Mark Simpson on the same theme. In your response, and again a few moments ago, you noted that there needs to be a review of the fuel payment infrastructure in Scotland. Have you discussed that with the Scottish Government, and can you comment on whether it is likely to—or wants to—do that?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 8 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
You say that Social Security Scotland would need to go back to the DWP. I understand that, if it does that in one week, it gets the data from that week and that is it. However, if the mechanism is there to get that data once, surely it would not be administratively burdensome to get that data several times over a longer period.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 8 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
No, I do not think so. I asked about the unreliability of the cold weather, which you touched on. Do you have more to add to that?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Good morning, and thank you all for the information that you have provided so far.
During the pandemic, a number of things had to be paused, and you did some work on the Covid inquiry. In your view, do the terms of reference, which have been updated as a result of Lady Poole’s resignation, now take account of human rights? Do you expect that the inquiry will be framed by that, and can the committee or parliamentarians do anything to ensure that that is the case?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Do you have a view about what that would look like?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
I have one further question about staffing and resources. In your opening statement, you mentioned that you are a “lean” organisation and you said that you hope to build up to having 14.5 members of staff during the coming year. We will talk more about the incorporation of the new human rights bill, but if that was required, do you think that you would need to exceed that number of staff for further incorporation, and do you have a sense of why you are leaner? Are you proportionately leaner, or do you have less resource and staff?
10:15Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
What is your view on the Scottish Government’s response to the recommendations?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Do you think that the inquiry will take your advice on that? Do you intend to give it advice to do that, or do you know how it will approach it?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2022
Pam Duncan-Glancy
Do you have a sense of the reason for that increase?