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 2321 contributions
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Willie Coffey
My colleague Graham Simpson will touch on outcomes in a wee while.
Meriem Timizar, you said that, in a number of circumstances, there is not even multilingual information to direct people from minority ethnic communities to those services. Is that the case? I mean, I am astounded, convener, if we do not even provide the information that people need to access a pathway to support services. Could you tell us more about that, please, Meriem?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Willie Coffey
Thanks so much for that, Kirsten.
Convener, does anyone else online want to contribute?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Willie Coffey
Thanks, Simon.
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Willie Coffey
Jo Anderson, can you offer a perspective on that? The funding has been increasing, but are we targeting it correctly?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Willie Coffey
Thanks very much, Meriem. The committee will be keen to follow that up.
Kirsten Urquhart, I know that you have to leave at about half 10, but can you give us a little perspective on these issues and why these inequalities exist, particularly for young people? We saw in the report that young people often report much higher levels of anxiety, stress and mental health-related issues, and you described a few circumstances. However, can you give us a flavour of what we need to do more to effectively target spend where it is needed in order to reduce the inequalities that we are talking about?
Public Audit Committee
Meeting date: 9 November 2023
Willie Coffey
Thank you.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Willie Coffey
What about that 18-month lead-in time? Is that something you would all broadly support so we can work out the implementation of this locally?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Willie Coffey
The question of national parks recently came up in discussion. There are varying views on them, but how do we ensure that the national parks receive their fair share of the visitor levy? They can span multiple authorities, as we all know. How do we solve that particular problem? Rob Dickson, I will start with you again.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Willie Coffey
Donald Emslie, do you have a view?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Willie Coffey
Should the money that is raised locally be spent in that area only? For example, say it was Skye we were talking about, and people are staying there, should the money raised through the levy be restricted and spent in that area or should the local authority be allowed to spend that revenue wherever it chooses in the authority?