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 成人快手 and committees will automatically update to show only the 成人快手 and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of 成人快手 and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of 成人快手 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 1228 contributions
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Ivan McKee
We would need to separate the NPF4 document and the policies that are articulated in it, which, as I indicated earlier, we would not want to change. The guidance that sits alongside the NPF4 document gives clarification on whether it is required and how it may be interpreted, adopted and implemented.
The guidance is dynamic. If we identify that more information or more clarification is required, we follow that up. The suite of guidance is easily accessible for those who are seeking to review it. What we have in that regard is already dynamic in that the guidance changes to address challenges, concerns and more new information.
We would not want to go back through the NPF4 process, because that process gives us stability on the policies and it is important for people to have certainty on that.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Ivan McKee
As I said, it is for planning authorities to make such decisions, but we are very active in working with them to share best practice and put more resource into the planning system at a macro level across the country. As I have said, we have done so by increasing fees and taking steps to bring in more individuals to be trained as planners.
We are also working with some local authorities鈥攑articularly smaller ones鈥攖o explore opportunities for them to co-operate with other local authorities in sharing resources, particularly specialist resources that are in shorter supply. We are active in that space, but where there are opportunities to do more, we are very interested in pursuing them.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Ivan McKee
Those are pretty much in place on an on-going basis. There is a heads of planning group, a high-level planning group and specific groups on other issues. There is a lot of, and increasing, engagement with key agencies.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Ivan McKee
If we look at the numbers, we see that far more units are given planning permission every year than are started or completed. There is a significant amount of land out there for which there is planning permission but which is not getting built out. I do not think that the issue is that not enough planning permission is being granted; there is plenty of land that could be built on. There are other issues, and part of the work that we are doing is to understand why, once land has got planning permission, development is not being taken forward.
There are resourcing challenges that we will talk about, and we have done an awful lot of work to address that, but the evidence shows that although units are being given planning permission in significant numbers under NPF4, those numbers are significantly in excess of the number of units that are actually getting built.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Ivan McKee
In the planning system, NPF4 and the guidance lay down the framework in which planning decisions are made, and conditions are there to ensure that there is compliance when the development is taken forward. Enforcement would be up to local planning authorities. I am not aware of specifics on that. If you have more details, it would be helpful to hear them. Cara might wish to say more.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Ivan McKee
I am trying to work out how we would do that other than if people came forward and told us that it was happening.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Ivan McKee
Yes, and the team is in place to do that. In some cases, it is not a question of resource but of taking on board all the different aspects from different stakeholders and ensuring that we have the guidance to target the right issues and cover all the different aspects that need to be covered. If there is a resource issue, we will look at that, but that is not the primary issue with regard to the production of guidance.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Ivan McKee
We would be delighted for house builders to build 25,000 units a year. In recent years, an average of 29,000 units a year have gone through the planning system. That goes back to the point that I made earlier. There is planning permission for 164,000 units that have not been built out yet. Clearly, there is a range of reasons why they have not been built, and we are doing quite a bit of work to understand the specifics of that, but a target of 25,000 homes when we are giving planning permission for 29,000 homes each year points to the fact that a lack of planning permission is not the barrier to people building houses.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Ivan McKee
The numbers are there in the minimum all-tenure housing land requirement, which is based on the housing needs assessment. With an additional factor built on top of that, the number comes to just under 20,000 homes a year and some 197,000 over the 10-year period. That is an assessment of what the need is. Each local authority has a minimum number and some have significantly higher numbers in their local development plans鈥攊n some cases, 30 or 40 per cent higher, depending on the local situation鈥攂ut none has numbers below the minimum. That is what the assessed need is, but if developers want to take forward more of the plots that have already been given planning permission, we are supportive of that.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Ivan McKee
Absolutely. There will be a mixture of stuff in there. There will be stuff about flooding and some of the issues that we have talked about, such as biodiversity and woodland and so forth鈥攕ome of which we might be able to resolve and some of which are harder to resolve. That also leads into the work that we are doing on the review and audit of key agencies to see how they are approaching planning and what can be done to streamline those processes.