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 2389 contributions
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Mark Ruskell
No—that is fine. Between the two committees, I was just getting it clear in my head that that has been resolved.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Mark Ruskell
The other week, NatureScot said that it could make those changes if there was guidance from the Government. If there is a big issue with features encroaching on to existing designated sites, why does the Government not just issue guidance to NatureScot about how regulation 9D could be used?
It seems that this is the only issue that has come up in committee beyond the submission of PDF electronic documents. I am struggling to hear from any industry sector body how the current provisions of the habs regs are restricting economic growth and other benefits. I am hearing about PDFs and a technical issue about site designation; I am not hearing any other reasons. I still do not understand why this power is needed.
NatureScot says that if the Government gives it guidance, it can act on it. Why are you not giving guidance to NatureScot when DEFRA is clearly giving guidance in England?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Mark Ruskell
Does that include ecosystem health and integrity?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Mark Ruskell
Could a trigger mechanism be put into the bill on that topic in particular, so that it is not left hanging for lack of evidence and there is a clear pathway? We all know that ecosystem health and recovery is hugely important. It would be nice to put a target on it. If we do not have the data yet, when could that be?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Mark Ruskell
Is there any point in signing up to the global biodiversity goals for 2030 and 2045 if those are not reflected in legislation? The Government seems to be saying that the 2030 goal is lost and that we will do what we can through biodiversity action plans and strategies but we have no chance of meeting that target. It also seems to be saying that we might meet the 2045 target but we should not put it in legislation, because that would bind the Government to action that is beyond what we can actually achieve.
I am trying to understand the thinking behind that. Does it make sense to have such a target if we cannot meet it? If we have such a target, why not put it in legislation?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Mark Ruskell
Rhoda Grant raised the issue of invasive non-native species. I can barely remember this, but I think that INNS came up in 2004, in the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Bill. In fact, I might have lodged an amendment on the issue, back in those early days. The issue is getting worse. I have become aware of NatureScot’s powers to access sites, emerging issues around the expansion of Sitka spruce into native woodland restoration areas and growing issues around a pheasant population that is exploding. Those were not necessarily huge issues 20 years ago, but there are now big issues to do with INNS that could restrict our ability to restore ecosystems. Would you be open to looking at those issues in the bill? It feels like this is an opportunity to make a change, given that the previous bill that considered INNS was in 2004—a long time ago.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Mark Ruskell
Okay. If there is a way to introduce some agility into the bill now to sort an issue in future, that would be worth having a conversation about.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Mark Ruskell
Section 13 adds “nature restoration” as a ground for intervention in deer management. However, control schemes under the section 8 powers in the 1996 act have not been used until relatively recently. Do you envisage the position changing under the bill, with more use of section 8 powers?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Mark Ruskell
Populating the debate and explaining examples is a really good way to proceed. The farm that you describe sounds like a great farm. It sounds as though the farmers already have a plan for what they want to do in the future, including with regard to peatland, and they have a really clear idea about where they are going.
Surely it comes down to the format of the land management plan and the associated guidance. If it was a case of consulting on the land management plan or any access arrangements and their future farm management plan, it sounds to me—because it is a professionally run farm with a farming family at the heart of it—as though all the information is already there. Therefore, a land management plan could be a fairly simple thing to pull together and perhaps the subject of a really exciting conversation with the local community about how it can support and feed into what Cora Cooper and her farm are attempting to do.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 3 June 2025
Mark Ruskell
Ariane Burgess sends her apologies. As members know, she is the convener of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, and stage 2 of the Housing (Scotland) Bill is concluding in the committee today.
I will speak to amendment 310 and other amendments in the group. We are all aware that Scotland is very much an outlier among many of our European neighbours in that ownership of land is hugely concentrated, and this bill delivers the next step in land reform. However, any land reform legislation must deal with private property rights, so it is crucial that the process is underpinned by the concept of public interest. That is a widely used term in Scottish and United Kingdom legislation, with more than 200 mentions in primary legislation, including existing land reform legislation on community rights to buy. The concept of public interest is also widely accepted in international law. It forms an integral part of the protection of private property in article 1, protocol 1 of the European convention on human rights, which says that
“No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest”.
The Parliament and the Government can curtail that right in particular circumstances, provided that those are set out in law and that the curtailment is in pursuit of a legitimate aim and is proportionate. In many forms of legislation, those circumstances are determined by a public interest test. In this legislation, questions of addressing the public interest in the ownership of land have been inexplicably avoided, with a transfer test and lotting decisions being determined by the impact of the specific landholding on community sustainability, a concept that implicitly deals with the public interest but which remains quite poorly defined and which has no apparent legal precedent. Centring the public interest rather than community sustainability would be a far stronger legal position and would be likely to establish a clearer precedent to avoid future legal challenge, as research for the Scottish Land Commission has made clear.
That raises the question of why the Government has not explicitly engaged with public interest considerations, despite the SLC’s recommendations and the fact that the Government’s consultation was clearly framed in relation to a public interest test. As it stands, the bill provides little clue or definition as to what the relevant public interest considerations are in the ownership of land. The bill needs to consider the public interest in the sale, ownership and management of land.
09:15Amendment 310 seeks to place public interest considerations in the bill. That will ensure predictability, transparency and coherence for the landowners who will be producing land management plans and potentially engaging with a transfer/public interest test. If the amendment passes, landowners will produce LMPs based on public interest considerations that would also underpin any assessment if they were to buy or sell land over the threshold. On behalf of Ariane Burgess, I thank Community Land Scotland for its support in preparing the amendment.