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 łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of łÉČËżěĘÖ 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 1673 contributions
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Russell Findlay
Do you refer everything, even a complaint about excessive force?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Russell Findlay
The figures in the financial memorandum might actually go down—you never know.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Russell Findlay
The PIRC previously raised with the committee a particular shocking case in which an individual was wrongly arrested, locked up for a number of days and subsequently apologised to and compensated. That was a number of years ago. Are you now confident, post-Angiolini, that that type of incident is not likely to reoccur? Does it require legislation to prevent such matters from reoccurring or will the non-legislative parts of the Angiolini report’s recommendations, which are mostly implemented, prevent something like that from happening again?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Russell Findlay
Sorry, what does the number 140 relate to?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Russell Findlay
Thank you.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Russell Findlay
Section 6 of the bill will allow for the continuation of gross misconduct proceedings once an officer retires or resigns. In response to that, your submission says that, when that happens, it should be subject to a public interest test, which obviously makes sense—it should not be so prescriptive as to require every case to be pursued when there may be good reasons not to do so. Could you offer a definition of what that public interest test might look like, and whether it should be set out in the bill? Does the bill need to be amended so that it is clearer about what sets of circumstances the provision might apply to?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 16 May 2024
Russell Findlay
Sure.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 16 May 2024
Russell Findlay
Yes, such as in medical, legal or social services. If there is sensitive information, the chair or judge can clear the room or put reporting restrictions in place.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 16 May 2024
Russell Findlay
Absolutely.
One of your recommendations is for gross misconduct hearings for officers of all ranks to be held in public. The version in the bill covers officers of senior rank only. In its evidence, the Scottish Police Federation described such hearings as being “like a public flogging”. The Association of Scottish Police Superintendents said that it was like putting officers “in the stocks”. The ASPS also expressed concerns about the sensitivity of personal information. What would your response be to those concerns?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 16 May 2024
Russell Findlay
I believe that, when you were conducting your review, you spoke to a number of witnesses, both members of the public and police officers, past and present, and I think that we have heard from some of the same individuals. In many cases involving police whistleblowers, careers have been destroyed, people’s health has been harmed—often for life—and they have suffered huge financial impact. In the cases that we have heard about, much of that was avoidable and good people were lost from policing. Does the bill do enough to protect whistleblowers?