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 1589 contributions
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 March 2024
Ross Greer
The 200m distance is one notable difference in your bill. The other is the private property provision. I believe that colleagues will come in on that—I am happy to come back if that is not covered, convener, but I do not want to tread on anybody’s toes.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 March 2024
Ross Greer
Given your point that people might not know what that flag is, I will pick a more recognisable Christian symbol, such as the cross or the fish. Such symbols are associated with a faith whose church teachings are very clear on abortion. I am not referring to all Christians or all Catholics, but the Catholic Church has every right to be clear about its position on abortion. If a symbol that is clearly associated with a particular organisation—in this case, a church that takes an anti-abortion position—were to be displayed in the window of a home or from a flagpole in the garden, would that, in and of itself, be a breach of the bill’s provisions, or would it have to be something more than that?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 March 2024
Ross Greer
As others have already noted, effective operation of the provision within the zones will depend to a significant extent on the judgment of police officers who are either called to or are already at vigils or protests. They will be asked to exercise their judgment about whether the behaviour—whatever form it takes; silent prayer is the one that has been identified as being the most difficult to judge—constitutes a potential offence because it either seeks to influence, or recklessly has the effect of influencing, women who are seeking an abortion. How will police officers be supported to make that judgment? Will there be operational guidance from Police Scotland? Will there be guidance from the Lord Advocate for procurators fiscal? The bill does not provide enough information in that respect, because that is not what legislation is for, but I would like to know how we will support police officers to uphold the legislation, if the bill is passed, because they will be asked to make quite tricky decisions.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 19 March 2024
Ross Greer
I think that a priest visiting a parishioner for the purposes of providing pastoral support would be the opposite of reckless.
I will drill down into this point, particularly regarding silent prayer. We can all understand the intent element of the provision, where the intent is very deliberately to influence people who are having an abortion. However, you mentioned that the second element is about recklessly having that effect. How exactly is “reckless” defined? You mentioned that that term is present in other areas of law. As I asked the minister earlier—which you might have caught—is that covered by the reasonable person test, or is recklessness defined separately?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 13 March 2024
Ross Greer
Does your office have a position on the solution? We are all now incredibly and wearily familiar with how hard it is to get a CSP and how few young people have them, and with the issues about getting a CSP but it still not making a difference. Does your office have a position on the need for the legislation to change, or is it an implementation issue? Alternatively, is it both, or both/and?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 13 March 2024
Ross Greer
I think that I saw Marie Harrison looking to come in, convener.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 13 March 2024
Ross Greer
Convener, can I just—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 13 March 2024
Ross Greer
I can see that Megan Farr is looking to come in. First, however, I want to follow up on that point. The cynical answer to the question why local authorities do not understand that is that they do understand it; they just do not want to implement CSPs.
In general, a child’s plan will be less resource intensive or will, at the very least, mean that the local authority is somewhat shielded from potential legal redress through the tribunal system. Is the cynical explanation fair, given the amount of information that has been provided over such a long period of time?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 13 March 2024
Ross Greer
At various points, everyone on the panel has been keen to talk about co-ordinated support plans, which you will all be delighted to know that we can now do.
Chloe Minto said that co-ordinated support plans are important because they open up the route for legal redress through the tribunal. This is my first question. Given that co-ordinated support plans are as rare as hens’ teeth—0.2 per cent of all pupils with a recognised additional need have such a plan—is it an issue that there are no other routes to access the tribunal? You can either fight really hard to get a CSP—the vast majority of children with additional support needs will not get one, though—or you can go for the somewhat nuclear option of trying to get a placing request and moving the child out of the mainstream school into a special school. Is there an issue, in that CSPs are the only route to access the tribunal while staying in a mainstream setting?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 13 March 2024
Ross Greer
I would like to pick up on a point that is somewhat tangential, but I hope that it will make a neat segue. A moment ago, Lynne Binnie acknowledged that the legislation on additional support needs in Scotland sets out a very broad definition of additional needs that is universally—certainly widely—supported. Not every child or young person with a recognised additional need will require a co-ordinated support plan, but you will be aware that the committee has heard evidence that only around 0.2 per cent of kids with recognised needs have such plans. I am interested in hearing Lynne Binnie’s and Nicola Dickie’s perspectives on that. Do you recognise the concerns that we have heard from others that that proportion is simply far too small, or is there a different explanation here? Is it appropriate that there are CSPs for the 1,000 or so kids with the most complex needs—is that the proportion that you would expect?