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 883 contributions
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 12 June 2024
Elena Whitham
Do you feel that the data is being collected in the way it needs to be collected so that the industry can start to address the issues, obviously with input from the Scottish Government? Do you think that we have the data that we need to see how climate change is affecting the sea temperatures and impacting the aquaculture sector?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 5 June 2024
Elena Whitham
Good morning. I am interested in the interaction between farmed salmon and wild salmon populations, and the potential risks around that.
The Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee recommended that a proportionate approach should be taken to minimise that risk. The panel members have already spoken a little bit this morning about the risk from sea lice, and I am thinking about introgression of genetic material as well. John Aitchison, has a precautionary approach been applied?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 5 June 2024
Elena Whitham
The committee is aware that WildFish and the Coastal Communities Network have submitted a complaint to Environmental Standards Scotland about SEPA’s sea lice regulatory framework, which has already been touched on. Would you like to add anything about why you have submitted that complaint and what your key concerns are?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 5 June 2024
Elena Whitham
I have another question. [Interruption.] Sorry—the dog walker has just brought my dog home. You can see it walking on the back of the couch.
Does anybody want to comment on the issue of escaped farmed salmon’s interaction with the wild salmon population? It is a multifaceted situation.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Elena Whitham
I understand the distinction that needs to be made, but following on from my colleague Emma Roddick’s point, we are taking evidence in this place on breeders who have 40 dogs in kennels in Scotland and are racing them in tracks in England. The welfare of those dogs is of paramount concern to this committee and indeed the petitioners. It comes back to the 2006 act and the balancing out of what is the acceptable level of harm that may come to those dogs and what are the welfare concerns. I do not know whether you have any points to come back on.
09:15Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Elena Whitham
Some of the things that I was going to ask about have already been picked up on. Could the 2021 statutory animal licensing framework be extended to include greyhound racing and could there be a licensing approach that might address some of our concerns? With my former local authority hat on, I wonder what the implications would be for local government if that were to be extended. My plea, I guess, is that Government actively looks at that matter and at ensuring that any regulations that come forward are considered by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and licensing officers and that their concerns are taken into account. Is this one of the only ways in which we can have more regulation in this area, given the crossover impact of people in Scotland racing their dogs in England?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Elena Whitham
Good morning, minister. The Scottish Animal Welfare Commission concluded that
“a dog bred for racing in Scotland currently has poorer welfare than the average of other dogs in the population.”
I want to focus on that for a little while. The report refers to how they are bred, how they are reared, trained and raced, and indeed how they are retired if they get to that point, or how they might end their lives by being put down. It also talks about the issue of wastage within the industry. Does the Scottish Government agree with the overall conclusion that dogs that are bred for greyhound racing have a poorer standard of welfare throughout their lives?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Elena Whitham
On the assertion about them being pets, I think this is where we get a bit confused about how the tracks operate in two different places. We have the issue with GBGB tracks that the animals must be kept in kennels; they cannot be part of a family set-up. I am not so sure if that works for dogs that are raced at the only track that we currently have in Scotland. I do not know whether they are able to be part of the family or whether they have to be kennelled and not kept as part of the family as a pet in order to race. That is where it gets a bit confusing for us in trying to unpick the differences between here and England.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 22 May 2024
Elena Whitham
Yes. Further to what the convener was asking about, is the Government considering extending the licensing requirements to include greyhound racing? We know that people were evenly split down the middle in the consultation, but does this approach provide us with a way of starting to address some of the issues, if indeed the member’s bill does not reach its conclusion?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 8 May 2024
Elena Whitham
Amendment 22, in my name, will make it very clear that
“the promotion and support of practices that protect and improve animal health and welfare”
are core objectives of Scottish agricultural policy. I know that there is cross-party and broad stakeholder support for ensuring that we recognise the key role of promoting and supporting animal health and welfare in the successful delivery of other objectives.
The case that there can be no high-quality food production without first ensuring that practices deliver animal health and welfare is well made and I am sure that all here support it. Some might say, however, that animal welfare matters are already covered in law elsewhere, that the issue is accepted and does not need further elaboration. That surely only highlights, in my view, how integral it must be to what we do. By including it as an objective, we are making a clear statement of the values of Scottish agriculture. If we want the world to acknowledge the provenance and high quality of our Scottish produce, we must start with being clear that the promotion and support of welfare matters deeply to us. I therefore ask the committee to support the amendment.