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 2643 contributions
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
Mark Ruskell
Are there other approaches to running bus companies and services that we should look at? Some of the challenges with rural services have already been mentioned. I know that a number of community bus groups are running their own rural services and they have done very well: they have increased the number of bus users and are running more regular services that are keyed in to what rural communities want. I am also aware of the spreading of municipalisation and public sector control of bus services, particularly in English cities. There is potential for that to happen in Scotland as well.
I am interested in your thoughts on whether it makes a difference who owns, controls and runs services, and on whether the experimentation with flat fares in England has worked. Is that something that you would welcome here? What is good?
It is clear that some services are declining, particularly in rural areas, and that they have been doing so for a long time. What is working and what could help to restore our services? Robert Samson, do you want to start?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
Mark Ruskell
Thank you.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
Mark Ruskell
I actually want to address my question to Gordon Martin and Kevin Lindsay. It is about the changes in station staffing and whether they have implications for managing antisocial behaviour. In particular, I was thinking about situations where a lone worker is managing a station with reduced hours and reduced staffing and how that works in antisocial behaviour hotspots at particular stations. A bit of an insight on that from the rail industry would be useful.
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
Meeting date: 3 April 2025
Mark Ruskell
I welcome the Parliament’s focus this afternoon on environmental justice. The loss of our right to a healthy environment as European Union citizens was a Brexit betrayal and, if the SNP Government still has the desire to rejoin Europe, it should enshrine the right to a healthy environment in law without any further delay.
The reality is that the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Continuity) (Scotland) Act 2021, which was passed in the previous session of Parliament in an attempt to deal with the results of Brexit, ended up as a scrabble to save four decades of environmental rights that we won through working within the European Union. Those were hard-fought-for rights that were forged from the campaigning efforts of citizens movements that had been fighting pollution and destruction over many years in the European Union.
The establishment, through the 2021 act, of Environmental Standards Scotland was critically important, and the body has shown its effectiveness. ESS has stepped in where the European Commission left off, by holding the Government and its agencies to account on issues from air quality to water quality and many more besides. However, in truth, even before Brexit, the Scottish and UK Governments were allowing the environmental governance gap to widen and were failing to commit to reforms, including the establishment of an environmental court. On its own, ESS does not deliver environmental justice for citizens. It cannot even consider individual cases and, even if it could, it could not perform the critically important role of an environmental court.
The Aarhus convention, if upheld, ensures a route for citizens to legally challenge decisions. However, rather than upholding the principles of the convention, the Scottish Government has consistently been non-compliant with and in breach of article 9 for the past decade. When the Acting Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Energy came to the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee recently, she was unable to commit to a date or even a time horizon for full compliance. We have heard a similar lack of commitment today from the minister.
It is the consistent breach of article 9 that is partly linked to the significant legal costs for environmental cases. As Richard Dixon of ESS highlighted in committee, a judicial review can cost between £30,000 and £40,000 a day. That is an eye-watering amount of money that is in direct contravention of the convention, which requires legal procedures not to be prohibitively expensive.
As we have heard from a number of members, corporate interests have deep pockets, but individuals struggle to secure legal aid for environmental cases, and, of course, legal aid is not available to charitable organisations. In addition, the loser pays rule means that litigants who lose their case are liable for their opponents’ expenses, which, as the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland notes, can end up costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds. In fact, the centre noted that, on a number of occasions, it has decided not to pursue legal challenges because of the direct financial risk to it.
However, even if all the costs were removed, the Government would still be non-compliant with the Aarhus convention, because it considers only judicial reviews and not merit-based ones, despite both being required under the convention. Legal challenges can be made only on whether the decision-making process was followed properly, so there is no scope to consider substantive issues, including whether a decision was made with full consideration of the evidence.
As we saw with the climate-wrecking decisions of the Tory Government to prove the case for the Rosebank oil and gas field, when evidence is ignored, the Supreme Court can step in, but only after a sustained and very costly legal challenge from multiple parties that again focuses primarily on process. The Rosebank decision was focused on the process. It touched on the merits, but we need full merit-based challenges.
There are other actions that the Scottish Government can take. As we have heard, it can reform legal aid to make it more accessible for environmental cases, remove the loser pays rule and extend the exemption from court fees for Aarhus cases to the sheriff courts, as well as establishing an environmental court and increasing access to justice and judicial expertise on environmental cases.
Failure to comply with the Aarhus convention is a political choice that the Scottish Government has made over and over again.
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
Meeting date: 3 April 2025
Mark Ruskell
Can the minister say when Scotland will be compliant with the Aarhus convention?
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
Meeting date: 3 April 2025
Mark Ruskell
It is disappointing that Douglas Lumsden is trying to boil it all down to one particular decision and one particular issue. I respect the fact that there will be communities that want to challenge the pylon lines. It was the same with the Beauly to Denny case. There will also be communities that want to challenge other forms of development, such as fracking, Mr Lumsden, fossil-fuel power stations at Peterhead and wind farms. They should all have the right to challenge such developments, but the justice system needs to respond quickly and proportionately.
The planning system is also hugely important. It deals with where renewable energy development should take place—and where battery storage should be, because we need more of that, Mr Lumsden—and the role of communities in that system is absolutely critical. That is the same for pylon lines, for renewable energy, for the dualling of the A96 and for all the other developments that many people feel are necessary and which, in some cases, the Government wishes to support. They need to be adequately planned before things get to the point of judicial review.
The climate and nature crises are only worsening, so we need to deliver environmental justice, and we cannot wait another decade for the principles of the Aarhus convention to be fully enshrined in Scots law.
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
Meeting date: 3 April 2025
Mark Ruskell
Women, particularly disabled women, experience sexual assault and harassment on public transport and have expressed concern about being less safe in unstaffed stations. What actions does the Government intend to take to guarantee women’s safety, particularly at the growing number of unstaffed stations?
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
Meeting date: 3 April 2025
Mark Ruskell
If I have time, I will take Mr Lumsden’s intervention.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
Mark Ruskell
I have a question about the target areas that are not included in the bill. The advisory group originally recommended targets on positive outcomes for biodiversity from public sector and Government policy—for example, on investment in nature. Do you have a view on those areas? Do you already set targets in those areas?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
Mark Ruskell
Does Mark Lodge have anything to add?