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 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees will automatically update to show only the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ 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, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2023
Finlay Carson
Can I interject here? We are trying to avoid getting into a bigger discussion about the pros and cons of the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill at the moment. It would be helpful if, at some point in the future, we could have the minister and her officials back with us to set out the Scottish Government’s position. We could also take the opportunity to hear other stakeholders’ views. Today, though, and with the information that is before us, I would not want to put the minister or committee members in such a position when we are specifically considering the implications of the LCM and clause 42.
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 25 January 2023
Finlay Carson
Our next item is consideration of two Scottish statutory instruments that are subject to the negative parliamentary procedure.
Does any member wish to comment on the Agriculture (Retained EU Law and Data) (Scotland) Act 2020 (Consequential Modifications) and Agricultural Products, Aquatic Animal Health and Genetically Modified Organisms (EU Exit) (Amendment) Regulations 2022?
As no member has indicated that they wish to comment, we will move on to consider the second SSI.
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Finlay Carson
Alasdair Allan would like to ask a supplementary question.
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Finlay Carson
You must have an idea. You said that you had a mixture of feedback from the sector. Where is the sector saying that this has gone wrong? You admit that uptake is way lower than expected, so what does the feedback tell you is the reason? If it is not about difficulty in accessing the scheme or claiming, or about farmers not recognising the benefits of doing it, where is the problem that you are hearing about from the stakeholders?
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Finlay Carson
Apologies for harking back to the carbon audits and soil testing, but I think that we all agree on how key that is to agriculture moving forward. Given that we are still experiencing a very low uptake, can you come back to us and let us know what your revised expectations are of uptake of soil testing and carbon audits? Given your engagement with industry, can you give us a better idea of where you feel improvements could be made to increase the uptake?
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Finlay Carson
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Finlay Carson
Is that not in 2025?
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Finlay Carson
Okay.
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Finlay Carson
Okay. Thank you.
Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Finlay Carson
We will now look at supporting islands.