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 łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of łÉČËżěĘÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of łÉČËżěĘÖ 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 1619 contributions
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Jamie Greene
I am sure that we will all support that.
In the policy briefings that came with the SSIs, the sections on the financial effects for each instrument state:
“The Minister for Community Safety confirms that ... the instrument has no financial effects on the Scottish Government, local government or on business.”
I have two questions on that. First, multiple ministers have claimed that the financial effects of the legislation were the cause of the delay. That seems to contradict what we are asked to do today. Clearly, there is a financial effect, so I refer to the passing of the act in 2022. What did the financial memorandum claim as the forecasted cost of the legislation? Has it crept up since then? If so, will you provide some numbers? If you do not have that information to hand, I will be happy for you to write to the committee.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Jamie Greene
Given how difficult it is to bring charges and achieve convictions and successful prosecutions, and that we already have a wide-ranging set of laws prohibiting misuse of such devices, would the Government support a lengthy or lifetime ban from entering a football stadium anywhere in Scotland as a deterrent or incentive not to bring devices into sporting stadiums? Will the Government actively discuss that with clubs?
10:15Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Jamie Greene
Just to be clear, the financial memorandum also states that there will be no effect on business. I know that we are drip feeding the instruments to commence the legislation and that the restriction on the sale and purchase will not be until, I presume, 2025 or thereafter. There will be no compensation scheme in place until then. Is that correct?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Jamie Greene
I will try to rattle through my questions. Welcome to the committee, minister; congratulations on your appointment.
I want to first address the issue of pyrotechnics and flare misuse at sporting events, particularly football matches, which are clearly the most high-profile events that have been reported in the media. The existing legislation—the 1995 act—makes it illegal for pyrotechnics to be taken into sporting events, but it is clear that it is failing, otherwise we would not need to afford the police more powers. Can you explain the difference between what is already legal in football stadiums and what will happen in June, for the benefit of people who attend such venues?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Jamie Greene
It is not difficult to see who is letting off pyrotechnics. They are on camera and there are security guards around the stadium. The police must have a fair amount of intelligence on the individuals who are routinely responsible for that. I mention that because it is not only individuals; there seems to be a concerted and collective effort to let off flares at specific points during or before games. We have also seen the unfurling of banners related to the pyrotechnics issue.
What consultation has the Scottish Government had with football clubs, the Scottish Football Association and supporters organisations? Clearly, there is an underlying problem that is not limited to individuals breaking the law; events are clearly co-ordinated. How on earth will the police tackle the sheer volume of people who are letting off pyrotechnics?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Jamie Greene
Before you do, we are interested in why the clubs themselves not facing any penalty or liability if their supporters are routinely breaking the existing law and will clearly be breaking the new laws that we have passed. It seems to happen endlessly and there seem to be no consequences for the clubs. Is that conversation with clubs taking place?
Mary Hockenhull, I am looking at you. I am sorry; that is unfair.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Jamie Greene
My final question is on firework control zones, the introduction of which you mentioned is imminent. How many local authorities will introduce firework control zones? I recall that that was quite a meaty part of the legislation and much of the feedback from local authorities and their representative bodies was that it would come at a cost to them. I appreciate that you will introduce that legislation before summer recess and I am sure that we will have time to talk about it then, but that is not far away. What preparatory work has taken place in conjunction with local authorities to assist them financially to set up the zones and to run any local public awareness campaigns? Do we have any idea how many fireworks control zones there will be this coming year and where they might be?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Jamie Greene
I dare say. We heard lots of evidence on some of the localised issues. Do you not think that there may be slight confusion among the public, because they are getting the legislation in a very piecemeal way? There was the aggravator offence around attacking emergency service workers, which I will not go into today. There was the banning of sale to minors, then the firework control zones, then the banning of pyrotechnics and flares. Then there is the restricted sale, purchase and use. All that is taking place at different times and in different places. Is there a risk that we are undermining the underlying objective of the legislation by causing confusion around what people can and cannot do? A lot of people simply do not know what the rules are.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 3 May 2023
Jamie Greene
That is great.
I have questions on a few other bits and bobs. The first is about the public awareness campaign. The provisions will commence in June this year, but the committee passed the bill last year. Would it not have been helpful to start the public awareness campaign a little earlier? Is there any reason why it has been delayed until after the commencement of the legislation?
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 26 April 2023
Jamie Greene
I will not take too long. I commend the committee for spending a lot of time on the issue. The story from Russell Findlay was interesting, and it reminded me of the session that the committee held in private and anonymously with people who had similar experiences. All committee members sat in on various groups and listened to some of the stories, so we have already heard such points from others—the similarities are striking. To this day, I still have strong thoughts about the couple of individuals who I met and the sorry state of affairs that they were in. They were grown men who were broken as a result of the system.
There are lots of warm words, as I would expect to read in such a response from Police Scotland, and I do not doubt for a second that there are senior staff in the organisation who want to do something about the issue and who take it seriously—nobody wishes ill on their employees. However, what has come through is that a lot of buzzwords are being used but there is nothing that addresses some of the underlying factors and recurring themes that the committee has heard about and that I would like to be addressed.
There are some specific and clear issues. I said that I was not going to be long, but here I go with lists, convener. The first, which is important, is the churn of higher ranking officers, which seems to lead to huge issues around change management in the organisation. We heard direct experience of the effect on officers when someone new comes in with a new direction of travel and says, “It’s my way or the highway.” That has an effect on junior ranking members of staff, who not only do not have the confidence to challenge it but are in an organisation in which that is actively frowned upon—it is a hierarchical organisation.
The second issue is the poorly organised human resources support and processes. That has emerged in some of the protocol failures that we have heard about around disciplinary matters.
The third issue is the management of long-term sickness. Some officers feel that they are just seen as problematic, especially if they do not have a physical injury. People with physical injuries are perhaps dealt with more positively by their peers or by management, because the injury can be seen and it is perhaps seen as a sign of bravery and service. However, being off for mental ill-health, which is an injury in its own right as a by-product of the job, is somehow seen as a weakness. That is affecting people and the mental health support is clearly inadequate.
I notice that there is to be a retendering for the employee assistance programme, which will kick in next April, so it is about a year away. However, that is just a phone number, with someone in an outsourced call centre at the end of the line. I think that they need to up their game on that. However, it really comes down to the point that I made in the first part of the meeting: the fact that they are working with reduced officer and resource levels clearly adds pressure.
We know that we are losing people with experience at the top end, so we have a lot of younger officers who feel that they are getting chucked out on the front line to deal with traumatic situations much more quickly, which was confirmed to me when I went to the SPF event across the road recently. Of course, the officers will have to deal with some horrendous things as part of the job, but they are doing that in their first couple of weeks—they have been in training and suddenly they are dealing with suicides and turning up to other horrendous situations.
It is about both the volume and the type of workload, which has massively changed, as we know. I do not think that anything has been done to address that problem, which goes back to the collaboration issue and the need to remove some of those tasks from front-line officers. You will not solve the problem until front-line officers are able to just do what they are supposed to be doing. The problem is that they are spending their whole day, every day, dealing with quite severe mental health situations that they are clearly taking home with them.
Until we have a much more fundamental and honest conversation about the workload, the volume and the type of work that they are asked to do, I do not really think that we will fix the problem—all that we are doing is tinkering around the edges of how we support police officers when they do have a problem. It is always better to prevent than cure, convener.
I feel that there were welcome words in the responses, but not enough detail.