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 5030 contributions
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Miles has pre-empted the next set of questions and pushed us into another conversation. Before we go there, I want to stick with the more general housing to 2040 strategy, and then we can go back to his question. We will have a specific set of questions about the cost of living, tenant protection and interim measures, and Miles’s question might fit better there.
I will direct a quick question at you, Ken Gibb. In your written submission, you talked about some work that you have done—I think it is the JRF work that you led—and mentioned something about the need for
“Institutional reform ideas”
including a new
“housing and land agency”.
The issue of getting the land to build the housing on has not come up in this conversation. Will you talk a little bit more about that idea? I know that there are budget cuts and a new agency might not be possible, but I want to understand how that could help us.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
That is a good point. Thank you for raising the housing needs and demand assessment, because, as I understand it—my understanding is based on good work that is being done in Orkney—that assessment does not uncover the real need that exists in communities, because people who live in rural communities, in particular, do not put themselves on a list because they do not believe that there is any possibility of obtaining housing. We have not really clarified that. By digging underneath that in the way that some housing folks in Orkney are doing, we can uncover the real need that exists at local level.
Let us go back to Miles Briggs’s question about whether we need a new housing bill or whether we should go back and look at what is already available and dust it off.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
David Melhuish has indicated that he wants to come in. After that, I will move on to the final four questions that we still have to cover, which are focused on the regulations under the Cost of Living (Tenant Protection) (Scotland) Act 2022.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Should EPC ratings and other such things be included?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
I bring in Stephanie Callaghan, who joins us online and has been listening intently to the discussion.
12:00Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Pam, do you have a supplementary question on that point?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
We turn to questions from members. Please indicate to me if you would like to come in or to respond to something that somebody has said. The intention is that this should be a free-flowing conversation instead of a question-and-answer session, although sometimes that can be difficult to achieve. Let us see how we do.
I will start with a few general questions. To what extent do you think that the vision that is expressed in “Housing to 2040” is still fit for purpose and deliverable? Connected to that, do you think that the Scottish Government’s legislative programme, and its housing policy more generally, seek to deliver on the ambitions of “Housing to 2040” in a coherent way that considers the housing system holistically? Whoever feels prompted can come forward.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
I would like to come back to you for more detail on that, but first I will bring some other people in.
09:45Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Thank you very much for bringing in retrofit. That is certainly an aspect that I agree with you on.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Thank you. Other hands are going back up, but I will bring in Chris Birt first.