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 1311 contributions
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 2 March 2023
Jeremy Balfour
My final question is to the whole panel. There will be a further review of charity law once the bill has been passed, but is there anything missing from the bill that you think should be in the bill? Is there anything that stands out that would make the life of your charity and your trustees easier?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2023
Jeremy Balfour
I have no question, but I refer again to the interest that I noted under a previous item.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2023
Jeremy Balfour
We might return to that this afternoon in another of my questions, but are we looking at before summer or after summer? Is there at least some kind of timescale for when we can look out for this information?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2023
Jeremy Balfour
I understand that there is a statutory duty under the 2018 act, but, as we roll out the benefits and as we look at it, is it helpful to have a statutory duty, or would you rather have greater discretion so that you can look at each one? As you say, for certain benefits, we have to uprate by statute. Would it be helpful, as you review and see how the scheme works, not to have a statutory duty but for the Government to have discretion on how different payments should go up? Alternatively, are you happy to keep it statutory?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2023
Jeremy Balfour
That is fine.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2023
Jeremy Balfour
Before I ask my question, can I declare an interest? I am on the higher rate of the personal independence payment, so I have a financial benefit from one of the benefits we are talking about.
I go back to your comment about the winter heating payment being reviewed. Clearly, the sooner information sharing between the Scottish Government and the DWP can happen, the better. How quickly will the review take place and how will it be reported?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2023
Jeremy Balfour
That is all that I was looking for. I understand the legal point. I just wanted to know whether you are happy with that as it is.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2023
Jeremy Balfour
You have covered some of this already, minister, so I hope that we can do it quickly.
Clearly, to an extent, the funding mechanism creates an incentive to follow DWP uprating policies. Looking forward, do you see potential for the Scottish Government to take a different view and have a higher or a lower figure? Also, do you envisage any variation between benefits? You have gone for 10.1 per cent across all benefits. Can you see a day when maybe one benefit is uprated more than others so that the approach is more targeted? How easy is it to do that with the powers that you have?
10:00Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2023
Jeremy Balfour
My concern, minister, is that that could take months and we would then be in June or July. If you came to the view that you wanted to make the payments in November or December, that would give the DWP very little time to pass that information to you. Have you at least highlighted to the DWP the possibility that you might want to make the payment in this calendar year, and have you asked it by what date it would need to know? Hypothetically, if we wanted to make the payments at the end of November or the beginning of December, when would the DWP need to know that in order to be able to provide the information in time? Rather than you deciding in July that you want to make the payment in November and the DWP then saying that it is just not possible to provide the data quickly enough, do you have anything from the DWP saying that, if you want to make the payment in November, it needs to know that by whatever date?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 9 February 2023
Jeremy Balfour
Thank you. My final question is about the process. The committee was keen to look at taking a human rights approach to decision making and how that works. Is that something that the commission is looking at? Is taking a human rights approach one of the principles by which you judge these things? Moreover, do you also see that happening in the Scottish Government鈥檚 decision making?