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 1653 contributions
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Maggie Chapman
On your staffing mix, you have previously talked about the contractors that you use and the specialised work that they do, and your corporate plan includes a planned reduction in reliance on contractors. Will you provide us with an update on how that is going?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Maggie Chapman
That makes sense. It is good news to hear that people who come in as contractors see Registers of Scotland as a good place to work and an attractive proposition, and want to jump on board.
We have previously discussed the fact that cost is one of the reasons given in the corporate plan for wanting to shift the balance away from the use of contractors. Are you still aiming to make cost savings?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 14 June 2023
Maggie Chapman
I suppose that there is also a benefit for staff morale and the integrity of the staff team in having people who are there for the long term. How is morale, given the successes that you have had in dealing with the backlog and the increase of 7 per cent that you mentioned in relation to the land register?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 24 May 2023
Maggie Chapman
I could also add my pitch about tickets and the recall database that Gordon MacDonald mentioned. I have had an extraordinary number of pieces of casework about refunds of credit from energy companies, and it just seems incredibly difficult.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 24 May 2023
Maggie Chapman
Thank you for raising the legal services issue, because that will increasingly become something that we need to consider. You talked about vulnerability by characteristic or circumstance. Often, there are intersecting or compounding factors involved. Douglas, you mentioned that different people will have different vulnerabilities depending on the market that you are looking at, hence the importance of the cross-market work that you do. How do you interpret potentially intersecting vulnerabilities? Does that lead to policy change, advice change or that kind of thing?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 24 May 2023
Maggie Chapman
Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I want to explore the issue of vulnerable customers and consumers a bit further. Obviously, they are a statutory focus of your work, and you have clearly identified the issue as a cross-cutting theme. You have spoken a little about the challenges and issues. You said that you took a broad definition of a vulnerable consumer, and the definitions in the 2020 act refer to people who have
“fewer or less favourable options”
and are
“at ... greater risk of ... harm”.
How do you define vulnerability? How do you identify the vulnerable consumer?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 24 May 2023
Maggie Chapman
That is very helpful and interesting. Following the discussion that we had earlier, it is clear that there is a key role for collaboration and partnership working and the connection with the expert advisory group and drawing in lived experience from that. For example, would Advice Direct Scotland come to you and say that it is seeing an increasing number of calls, queries, complaints or questions on a specific issue? Would that allow you to track into either the expert advisory group with lived experience or your wider policy research?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Meeting date: 16 May 2023
Maggie Chapman
I have one final—
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Meeting date: 16 May 2023
Maggie Chapman
Thank you. I will leave it there, convener.
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee
Meeting date: 16 May 2023
Maggie Chapman
I will explore that a bit further. On the operation of the hotels, you talked about the need for culturally sensitive food and that kind of thing. What direct operational involvement do you have in the running and maintenance of the hotels once asylum seekers are accommodated there?