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
Is it possible to move away from annualising the SHIPs, given that the Scottish Government has to work on an annual budget? We have been having quite a bit of conversation about multiyear funding and that kind of thing. Would it be possible to do that? What would be the mechanisms?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
That is what national planning framework 4 is asking us to do. Marie, did you want to ask your question?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
We have some tenant participation in another piece of work that we are doing, which has been very helpful.
To continue the theme of including and involving local communities, tenants and residents in delivery plans, I invite Ronnie Macrae from the Communities Housing Trust to come in.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Is there some policy that should change, or do we need a different understanding? What would make that a happy marriage?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
That is a good point. Priority is coming through as a theme today.
Emma Jackson, you wanted to come in a while ago, so pick up wherever you want to.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
The committee has certainly taken an interest in damp and mould, and we have been taking evidence on that issue.
On the point about remaining in a home, I was at the Rural Housing Scotland conference last week, part of which was the Scottish Ecological Design Association—SEDA—land talks. A speaker pointed out that Scotland has around 40,000 empty homes—we have already touched on the need to tackle that—and there are 20,000 second homes in rural areas. They were basically pointing out where we can find potential for housing.
One striking figure was that there are 900,000 homes in Scotland—I need to find out where they got this statistic—with single people living in them. I have come upon quite a few situations in which single people want to move in order to downsize. I totally take the point that people need to be supported to remain in a home, but this situation is another bit of the puzzle. It touches on what Ronnie has been talking about—the holistic bit. We need to look at all the housing stock and the different situations and be able to say, “These people live in big houses, they are single, they are desperately needing to move out, and we can get families in there.” How do we start to move those things together?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
For sure. Certainly. Thanks for that.
We are supposed to be here for a maximum of two hours this morning. It is such a good conversation, but we do have quite a few things to get in, so I will bring in colleagues a bit more rapidly.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
Thanks very much for that. Willie Coffey has a couple of questions.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
We have our action plan.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 27 February 2024
Ariane Burgess
I will bring in Emma Jackson and then Chris Birt, if they have something new to add on this topic, and then go to Willie Coffey for his next question.