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 1673 contributions
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 15 November 2023
Russell Findlay
To recap, the workshops that you mentioned are not specific to this legislation.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 15 November 2023
Russell Findlay
There is another line in the report, on page 59, which really jumped out at me. It says:
“Police Scotland does not yet have a clear purpose, vision or strategy for its continued provision of mental health-related policing services”.
That begs the question: why on earth not, given that it has been such a big issue for such a long time?
However, instead of asking that question, I will ask one final question about what the report does not cover. It is 80 pages long and it is all about the policing of mental health in the community, but it does not address the mental health of officers. That is not a criticism, but we have been working with police officers who have had often life-changing, career-ending mental health problems, and the families of officers who have died from suicide. There is a sense that the report should have at least attempted to address some of those issues, but it does not. Is HMICS intending to do that as a standalone piece of work at some point?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Russell Findlay
Right. Thank you. SPS has known about it for four years. It is four months away and we still do not know the numbers. Moving on to HMP Glasgow, in your earlier answer, Mr O’Donnell, you said that—
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Russell Findlay
Can I quickly interrupt? Are you familiar with the £400 million figure? Did that come from the SPS as a guide price?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Russell Findlay
The background to that is that the governor of HMP Barlinnie said over the summer that a catastrophic incident in the prison is a question of when, not if. HMP Glasgow, the replacement prison, was due to open in 2026, yet here we are now saying that it will be another 12 months before we even know the cost of it and nobody knows what the opening date might be. Is that a fair representation?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Russell Findlay
The FBU’s “Firestorm” report is sobering and deeply concerning. Of course, inflationary issues have contributed to the capital backlog, but there has been a decade of accumulated underspend. The most recent figure put forward by the FBU is more than £800 million, and the SFRS does not disagree with that. Firefighters say that they and the public are being put at risk because of the situation, and that firefighters do not have the required decontamination facilities. Given the scale of the backlog, are you now having critical discussions in the Scottish Government about additional funding, over and above what might be committed in the budget? Is there perhaps an argument for the issue to be subject to a royal commission?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Russell Findlay
You do not think that there is a need for that.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Russell Findlay
Is that the beginning of the process?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Russell Findlay
When is completion likely?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Russell Findlay
I was not expecting that. I can certainly try to come up with a question but, if someone else has one, they might want to come in. I had a general question that might fit for courts.