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 5898 contributions
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Finlay Carson
We will move on to deal with the issue of wildfires in a little more detail. I have a question for Bruce Farquharson. Should the muirburn code include obligations for landowners to control the fuel load where there is an increased risk of wildfires? Countries such as Portugal have strict laws to ensure that landowners carry out some sort of muirburn—it is probably not called that in Portugal—to reduce the risk of incidents such as the one in Inverness last week.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Finlay Carson
In that case, should the muirburn code also cover those who are not burning for biodiversity, grouse moor or agricultural purposes, but are doing so basically to reduce fuel load?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Finlay Carson
I will bring in Robbie Kernahan before I go to Alasdair Allan.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Finlay Carson
I will take a brief comment from Emma Hinchliffe.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Finlay Carson
Ariane Burgess had a question but that has been covered as well, so I will move on to a question from Karen Adam, who will probably explore the issue a bit further.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Finlay Carson
I am going to move on. We are getting into the minutiae of the topic, and we need to be conscious of the time.
I will bring in Christine Grahame on the subject of wildfires.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Finlay Carson
Yes.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Finlay Carson
My point is that I have not had any comfort or assurance from anywhere that the agriculture bill will offer adequate provisions to give Scottish ministers these powers. I would find it difficult to make a decision on that, because I have had no reassurance that that will be the case. I am also concerned that there has been no risk assessment, because of the potential five-year period, which is slightly longer than I would consider to be temporary.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Finlay Carson
No. It is just that the policy note says that the NFUS
“stated that the forthcoming Agriculture Bill would offer ... adequate provision”.
If the NFUS has been given reassurances, it would be good for the committee to be given them, too.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 June 2023
Finlay Carson
That concludes our meeting in public.
12:45 Meeting continued in private until 12:48.