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 5056 contributions
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
I have to ask you to wind up, please.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Thanks very much for that. Do you want to come in with your next question, Willie?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
So, the barrier is the up-front costs that are involved in getting such sites developed to a point at which they can be built on.
11:30Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
That was a very good bit of work—I caught the tail end of it.
After we have heard from Chris Birt, we will go back to Miles Briggs’s question about the housing bill.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
We will move on. This next bit may or may not be relevant to everybody. We have questions on the regulations under the Cost of Living (Tenant Protection) (Scotland) Act 2022 and we thought that, rather than invite all or some of you back for a separate session, we would just do it while you are here.
Do you agree in principle that the Scottish Government needs to use its powers to amend the rent adjudication system to smooth the transition away from the rent cap? Do you agree with the proposed system in the regulations?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Before I bring in Marie McNair with another question, I have a question on the data. Are there processes in place by which we gather data that could easily be moved over to pull that information together? Are you aware of anything?
I see a nodding head—perhaps Gordon MacRae can say something on that point.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Did you say 50 per cent or 60 per cent?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Rather than a Scottish one—okay. Marie, do you want to come in with your question?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
What about gas boiler checks?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Thanks very much for pointing us in a particular direction at the end of that conversation.
This has been a really good conversation, and we could probably have spent a couple more hours unpacking some of the bits and pieces that have been raised around the room and throughout the conversation. I really appreciate your giving your time for the discussion.
I will briefly suspend the meeting to allow the witnesses to leave the room. Committee colleagues will then need to press on with some other bits and pieces.
12:09 Meeting suspended.