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
The committee previously agreed to take the next three items in private, so as that was the final public item on our agenda, I close the public part of the meeting.
12:16 Meeting continued in private until 13:00.Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Good morning, and welcome to the seventh meeting in 2024 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. I remind all members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent and that notifications are switched off. Stephanie Callaghan MSP will be joining the meeting online.
Agenda item 1 is to decide whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Do members agree to do so?
Members indicated agreement.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
It is good to have you here. I apologise, I have missed Stephanie Callaghan. I will have to work hard to remember that she is there.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
I want to go into that a little bit more. In last week’s meeting, we heard that the vision is good but the issue is that there was not a plan for delivering it. I would be concerned about going back to the starting point and creating yet another vision and another plan. Can you say more about where you think we need to begin, and whether there is something useful in the vision that we could act on?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Will you say a little more about the opportunities that you mentioned? You said that there was an opportunity to do a lot more and do it quicker if we join the dots. Will you be more specific about the dots that need to be joined? You mentioned policy, but what about what happens on the ground?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
There is the 26 per cent cut, which is a problem. Obviously, it is important that more money goes into the housing budget to be able to do some of this work. What would you say has to be done, given that housing takes time to build? We have heard from Chris Stewart about the struggle to attract people into the sector to build or retrofit houses. What do you think should be the priority? What do we need to change policy wise? Is it the type of housing that we build? We are still trying to have affordable accessible housing with all kinds of features, but if we are in a homelessness emergency and need to get people housed, what do we need to prioritise?
10:15Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
I call Pam Gosal to add her question to the conversation. I will then bring in Gordon MacRae, Rhiannon Sims and anyone else either to pick it up or to go back to other points, so that we have a bit of what I would call conversation weave.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Thanks for that. It is really important to go into that detail.
I want to pull the discussion back into more of a general space. Do you think that the Scottish Government is adequately balancing the need to address the short-term housing problems with longer-term policy aims? We have begun to touch on that question; indeed, we have already heard that that might not be the case. Somebody—Chris Birt, I think—talked about priorities, but where in the mix do the priorities need to change?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
What would that look like?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
David Melhuish, you wanted to come in a while ago, as did Chris Birt and Emma Jackson. You might have forgotten the points that you wanted to make, but please come back in and scoop up anything else that has been added to the conversation.