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: 14 November 2023
Ariane Burgess
Thank you for that—in my mind, you raise more questions that I am curious about. If you are talking about one single platform across Scotland, in which local authorities can choose to programme in their percentage or their flat rate, would that involve a relationship between the business and the local authority, or would it be a three-way platform through which the visitor makes a booking too?
I am seeing heads shaking. Come on in, Mirren—we will wait for you. We have to have these pauses.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 November 2023
Ariane Burgess
Thanks for that. Mirren, do you have anything to add?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 November 2023
Ariane Burgess
We are joined by our second panel of witnesses. I welcome Tom Arthur, the Minister for Community Wealth and Public Finance, who is supported by three Scottish Government officials: Ninian Christie, who is a solicitor in the Scottish Government legal directorate; Alisdair Grahame, who is a policy adviser in the local government and analytical services division; and Ben Haynes, who is the bill team leader for the Visitor Levy (Scotland) Bill.
Before we move to questions from members, I invite Mr Arthur to make a short opening statement.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 November 2023
Ariane Burgess
Thank you for that. To continue the theme of concerns that have been raised by business groups, one company told us that the bill appears to be offering “localism for localism’s sake”. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the concern that the proposal for local flexibility and variations might lead to confusion and complexity for customers and businesses.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 November 2023
Ariane Burgess
I wish to return to the point about the flat rate and the percentage rate. Something interesting came up with COSLA, in our previous panel, involving a request for ultimate flexibility and the ability to choose a flat rate or a percentage rate at the local level. I take your and others’ point that we are trying to create something that is user-friendly, simple, efficient and so on.
COSLA said that there are on-going discussions in quite a number of areas, but I wonder whether there has been discussion of the potential for an information technology platform for the process of calculating, collecting and auditing. If one local authority went for a flat rate and another went for a percentage, a digital IT platform could take the difficulty out of that. COSLA mentioned that it is exploring that with its digital IT team. Has the expert working group had any discussions about exploring the possibility of using IT to help us in that way?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 November 2023
Ariane Burgess
I call Miles Briggs.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 November 2023
Ariane Burgess
I appreciate you all coming this morning. Thank you so much, minister, for your thorough and in-depth responses. I get a sense that there are some areas where our questions have shown that more work needs to be done. It will be interesting for us to consider that in our report and to reflect that back to you.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 November 2023
Ariane Burgess
Thanks very much for those responses. We are obviously very concerned about the relationship with local authorities.
I call Willie Coffey.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 14 November 2023
Ariane Burgess
Good morning, and welcome to the 27th meeting in 2023 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. Mark Griffin and Stephanie Callaghan are joining us online.
I invite Marie McNair and Stephanie Callaghan to draw members’ attention to their interests.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Ariane Burgess
There are a number of members of the task force on the panel, so I would be interested in hearing how the task force came to recommend increased partnership working and why the group was not able to agree on a recommendation to expand the SSPCA’s powers. What were the key concerns and how are they addressed under the proposed compromise position?
I ask Susan Davies to start.