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 1499 contributions
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Michelle Thomson
James, is the concept of scalable building blocks and underpinning measures something that you are looking at as well?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Michelle Thomson
Ben, given your representatives’ wish for long-term patient capital, will you add your view on the concept of scalable commoditisation, if you like, of the market? Having heard what the two other panellists have said, how confident are you that we can really pull the golden threads together in the time in which we need to act, given the scale of the challenge?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Michelle Thomson
So it is good that I asked the question.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 March 2023
Michelle Thomson
I will finish off this bit. Derek, can you see the benefit of building in community benefit requirement mechanisms to square the circle in respect of some of these investments?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 March 2023
Michelle Thomson
I have a slightly different question before I finish up. Am I correct that you are involved in the Grangemouth future industry board?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 March 2023
Michelle Thomson
I absolutely understand about the principles of fair work. The discussion that you suggest would be helpful because you are at the coal face and you are monitoring the existing investments. The discussion is about your suggestions for how those principles can be deepened to put the community at the heart of things.
I will turn to SNIB. As you explained, you have not made investments, but how would you, by way of your impact assessment, ensure that the community is at the heart of things? To what extent is there a conflict when, obviously, you are skiting across the top looking at a return on your investment and at your debt to equity ratios and so on? I appreciate that this is in principle, given what you said earlier.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 March 2023
Michelle Thomson
Tell me a bit more about your involvement. Also, what is your understanding of GFIB’s governance model?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 March 2023
Michelle Thomson
You have given me a lot of helpful information about what you are doing in your various phases, but I must admit that I am not any clearer on the governance model and who specifically is ultimately accountable for GFIB’s output.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 March 2023
Michelle Thomson
Okay. Thank you.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 15 March 2023
Michelle Thomson
Good morning. We have touched on some of the themes that I will ask about, in terms of the role and involvement of the local community. Last week, we had some quite compelling evidence from Grangemouth including Skinflats community council, which talked about how the community feels as though it bears the weight of providing all that gross domestic product to the Scottish economy but gets no benefit.
Derek, I think that you said—you referenced Celtic Renewables and so on—that you are already investing in local companies. In terms of your impact assessment vis-à-vis the benefits to the local community, can you talk me through the process that you use? In other words, what did you specifically do to ensure that the benefit was felt in the community? I totally appreciate that you have a wider perspective as well.