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 2597 contributions
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Colin Beattie
An obvious question to ask is how we evidence that there is alignment. How do we know? We might have it in policy and in all the documents and so on, but how do we evidence that it has been achieved?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Colin Beattie
I will follow up on two very basic things that you mentioned in your interesting answer. You spoke about there being an endemic lack of confidence in the culture in Scotland. Are there any indications that the situation is improving? Further to that, is it possible to teach entrepreneurship? Could you create a class in school that would teach pupils about entrepreneurship?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Colin Beattie
I have one last question. You touched—you did not dwell too long—on Government policy. Are there deficiencies in Government policy? Are there things that need to be done?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Colin Beattie
James, what is your experience?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Colin Beattie
Let me ask you a very obvious question. What do you consider are the barriers to entrepreneurial activity in Scotland?
11:30Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Colin Beattie
What indication have you seen of people transitioning out of the oil and gas industry into renewables? Has there been any significant movement?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Colin Beattie
Would John O’Sullivan like to comment?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2023
Colin Beattie
I do not think that anybody is unaware that Scotland and the United Kingdom are seeing fairly substantial labour shortages across the board. The transition to net zero will increase the demand for certain skills and occupations. How significant will that constraint on skilled labour be on the renewable energy sector?
On the back of that, how confident are you that the skills and education system will deliver the pipeline of people and skills that you need?
I ask Claire Mack to kick off on that.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 December 2022
Colin Beattie
Let me move on logically from that and ask you to get your crystal ball out. What is your expectation with respect to consumer spending in 2023?
Our economy is consumer led to a greater extent than practically any other economy in Europe. We rely on people having disposable income to spend, which drives the economy. I will start by asking Carolyn Currie whether she has any thoughts on that. How much of a concern is that for businesses? How are they factoring in that risk on the consumer side? Alternatively, is there reasonable confidence that people will have that disposable income and that it will be spent as it has been in the past?
10:15Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 21 December 2022
Colin Beattie
Fergus Mutch, do you have a more cheery approach to this?