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 985 contributions
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2023
Katy Clark
My first question is for Ronnie Renucci, who focused on the fact that, in Scotland, we lack evidence or, indeed, any research to draw any conclusions, and referred to some work that has been done in England, which we will look at. Mr Renucci, could you summarise your understanding of any conclusions or, indeed, lack of conclusions that there might have been in the work on jurors in England that might be relevant to the legislation that we are looking at now? What is your understanding of that research? I appreciate that you did not do the work yourself.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2023
Katy Clark
Are you sure that the Scottish Government has not looked at that kind of evidence? It may well be that it has carried out that work, and that is how it has come to the proposal of eight out of 12. That figure might have been plucked out of the air, or it might be based on evidence. Have you any knowledge of that? Ronnie Renucci, you suggested that it had been plucked out of the air. Are you sure that it was, or do you think that the decision to settle on that figure might be evidence based?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2023
Katy Clark
Thank you.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2023
Katy Clark
That is fine. No problem.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 7 December 2023
Katy Clark
The regulations apply to
“a person with whom they”—
that is, Social Security Scotland—
“come into contact”.
Who, other than clients, would the organisation come into contact with? How would those people be informed about the use of their information?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 7 December 2023
Katy Clark
Thank you.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 7 December 2023
Katy Clark
Can you say any more about how that information will be used and how the person will be informed? What will be the processes in that respect? Will they be similar to what you have just outlined?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 7 December 2023
Katy Clark
Indeed. I lodged a final bill proposal this morning, but that is for a different discussion.
The 2002 freedom of information legislation enables designation of more bodies. Do you envisage there being provision to extend the range of bodies that are covered, if experience requires it?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 7 December 2023
Katy Clark
It is proposed that the council be given powers to request information from a very wide range of organisations. Can you justify that? Why are such extensive information-seeking powers proposed?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 6 December 2023
Katy Clark
I will follow up on that. You referred to the mock jury study, but we have been trying to look at the evidence for what the Scottish Government is proposing. One of our initial questions many months ago was about the data. We wanted to get an understanding of what kind of jury results we get at the moment. To what extent are they unanimous? To what extent are they very narrow results in favour of conviction or acquittal? Do you have any data or impressions about how clear outcomes are on juries? What data—either hard data or impressions—do you have?