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 MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs 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 5737 contributions
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 May 2022
Ariane Burgess
If no one else wants to come in, we will move on to questions from Willie Coffey.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 May 2022
Ariane Burgess
I will follow up. We have begun to discuss the issue, but I will tidy it up a little. I direct my questions to Chris to start with.
What challenges do you foresee in taking forward the single building assessment programme and the Scottish Government-funded cladding remediation work? That is one bit of the question.
I represent a region that has a lot of islands and rural areas. I am therefore interested in what challenges might be faced by those parts of Scotland. That is my second question.
I also have a third question—I will get them all in in one go. How do we ensure that quality is not compromised in favour of budgetary savings?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 May 2022
Ariane Burgess
I apologise for that suspension. We have sorted out the technical issue by moving to a new committee room. I will now give the floor back to Miles Briggs to continue with his questions.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 May 2022
Ariane Burgess
Are there any takers for that? Peter Drummond, do not worry about dominating the meeting, if you have the insight.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 May 2022
Ariane Burgess
As no one else wants to come in on that question, we will move on.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 May 2022
Ariane Burgess
We are having technical difficulties—Laura Hughes and George Edwardes cannot hear us. I will temporarily suspend the meeting until we sort that out, because I want them to be part of the conversation. I apologise for that.
10:09 Meeting suspended.Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 May 2022
Ariane Burgess
We have a request from George Edwardes to repeat the second question so that he can respond to it.
The regulations would prevent the use of highly combustible metal composite material in external cladding and insulation.
Is the definition of such material robust enough to ensure that the danger that is posed by that material has been reduced as far as is reasonably practicable?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 May 2022
Ariane Burgess
Thank you for that response and that clear direction for us to be aware of.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 May 2022
Ariane Burgess
Thank you for that useful detail.
Before drawing to a close, I want to give everyone the opportunity to say anything that they think we have not heard. Please indicate if you would like to come back in. I see that Chris Ashurst wants to do so.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 May 2022
Ariane Burgess
As no one else wants to come in, I draw to a close what has been a rich evidence-taking session. You have given us plenty of directions to look in and things to be aware of, which will be tremendously helpful in giving everyone on the committee themes that we might discuss with the minister next week.
As agreed at the start of the meeting, the next item will be taken in private. I close the public part of the meeting.
11:57 Meeting continued in private until 12:10.