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 2221 contributions
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Stuart McMillan
I will bring in Bill Kidd, who has a question about clause 16.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Stuart McMillan
Sir Jonathan, you mentioned the word litigation. Paul Sweeney’s question was about clause 8, but it made me think about the bill as a whole.
The word “uncertainty” has been used a lot by witnesses today, about what may or may not happen. Do witnesses expect litigation to take place because of the lack of clarity that is caused by the number of regulations and the volume of legislation that will be covered by the bill? There are 2,400 pieces of retained EU legislation and potentially another 1,400—possibly up to 5,000. I dare say that, at some point in the future, some organisations will operate and take decisions on the basis of what they think is the law, but potentially, because of the sunset clause, the initial law might not exist any more, because it will have fallen off the statute book. Do you expect an increase in litigation as a consequence of this legislation from the UK Government?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Stuart McMillan
The final area of questioning is on the issue of Henry VIII powers, which tend to bring some controversy any time they are spoken about.
Prior to the publication of the bill, the Public Law Project, in written evidence to the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee’s inquiry into retained EU law, stated:
“A broad Henry VIII power for the UK Executive to make law in any area of former EU competence would be constitutionally inappropriate.”
The Scottish Parliament’s Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee, in its recent report titled “The Impact of Brexit on Devolution”, stated:
“The Committee’s view is that the extent of UK Ministers’ new delegated powers in devolved areas amounts to a significant constitutional change. We have considerable concerns that this has happened and is continuing to happen on an ad hoc and iterative basis without any overarching consideration of the impact on how devolution works.”
Do the witnesses have any comment about the Henry VIII nature of many of the powers contained in the bill?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Stuart McMillan
Colleagues have no further questions. Do panel members have anything to put on the record that they have not already highlighted?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Stuart McMillan
Under agenda item 3, we are considering an instrument on which no points have been raised.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Stuart McMillan
Under agenda item 4, we are considering an instrument on which no points have been raised.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Stuart McMillan
Before I bring in the other witnesses, I will make a point regarding your first category. Certainly, it could be quite time consuming to pull something together in order to bring in emergency legislation. On the issue of capacity, which was raised earlier, as I asked Sir Jonathan, does the civil service actually have the capacity to look at all the legislation that is currently there? Dr Tucker indicated that officials would have to engage with all the legislation that is there. Given the short time that we have, there is a possibility that not every piece of legislation will be engaged with in order to make an active decision before a sunsetting happens or does not happen on each particular piece of legislation. I suggest that, given the capacity issue and the short timescale—notwithstanding the potential to extend the sunsetting—litigation could be a regular occurrence if businesses or trade sectors ended up being caught in something that was not fully considered beforehand.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Stuart McMillan
No problem.
I thank Sir Jonathan Jones, Dr Adam Tucker and Morag Ross KC for their extremely helpful evidence. The committee may follow up by letter any additional questions that stem from the meeting.
I suspend the meeting briefly to allow Morag Ross to leave the room and the other witnesses to leave BlueJeans.
11:17 Meeting suspended.Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Stuart McMillan
Is the committee content with the instrument?
Members indicated agreement.
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Meeting date: 13 December 2022
Stuart McMillan
Is the committee content with the instrument?
Members indicated agreement.
11:20 Meeting continued in private until 11:41.