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: 5 September 2023
Ariane Burgess
Thanks very much. Did you want to follow up on anything, Councillor Heddle?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Ariane Burgess
Teamwork, right? It is great.
I see that Pam Gosal wants to come back in.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Ariane Burgess
We move on to questions from Willie Coffey.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Ariane Burgess
I am heartened to hear about the progress that has been made since we were all together in May in Edinburgh for the evidence session that the committee held on the new deal. It is great to see that things are moving along swiftly. We are passionate about keeping an eye on the issue—obviously, local government is in our title, so it is important for us to support the process as much as possible.
The new deal highlights three shared priorities for the Government and COSLA—tackling poverty, a just transition to net zero and sustainable public services—and notes that there will be a focus on achieving “better outcomes”. I am interested to hear from you both about what discussions you have had on how you achieve those outcomes, and also how the priorities were identified and agreed.
11:00Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Ariane Burgess
Thanks very much.
I invite other members to declare any relevant interests that they might have.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Ariane Burgess
Thank you.
It is interesting that the “New Deal with Local Government: Verity House Agreement”—I think that that is the first time that have been able to say that in public—says:
“Community Planning Partnerships will be recognised as a critical mechanism for the alignment of resource locally, focussed on prevention and early intervention.”
It goes on, but it is important that community planning partnerships are central to the agreement between COSLA and the Scottish Government, so I am interested to hear what the minister thinks the role of community planning partnerships is.
The committee has made a number of proposals and it has ideas about how community planning partnerships can be improved, so if something is done to address those things, how can we give communities a voice in that through community planning partnerships, in the new deal that has been agreed?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Ariane Burgess
Councillor Heddle, in the eight years since it was passed, how successful do you think the Community Empowerment (Scotland Act) 2015 has been in shifting power to communities, and what does community empowerment look like to you? The Verity house agreement puts community planning partnerships in a central role, so how do we ensure that communities have a voice in the new deal?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Ariane Burgess
Under agenda item 3, the committee will take evidence as part of our post-legislative scrutiny of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. We recently concluded an inquiry into part 2 of the act, which concerns community planning, and the Scottish Government has now published its response to our inquiry report. That was the fourth part of the act that our predecessor committee looked at. The committee has also looked at part 9 of the act, which is on allotments. Our predecessor committee looked at part 3 of the act, which is on participation requests, and part 5 of the act, which is on asset transfers. Each of those elements is important in empowering communities.
Today, we will take the opportunity to reflect on what progress has been made across all four areas of the inquiry. To do that work, we are joined in person by the Minister for Community Wealth and Public Finance, Tom Arthur, and the Minister for Local Government Empowerment and Planning, Joe FitzPatrick. The ministers are joined by Scottish Government officials. Andrew Connal is community planning and public service reform team leader in the Scottish Government, and Kathleen Glazik is the community empowerment team leader. We are also joined online by Councillor Steven Heddle, who is vice-president of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, which is often referred to as COSLA. Councillor Heddle is supported online by Garrick Smyth, who is policy manager in the workforce and corporate policy team at COSLA. I welcome all of you to the committee.
As you can imagine, we have a number of questions. I will ask the first question. The evidence that we heard during our inquiry into community planning from community organisations, particularly in communities of interest, about the extent of the shift of power towards communities was a lot less positive than the evidence that we heard from public bodies. Eight years on, how successful has the 2015 act been in shifting power towards communities? We are interested to hear your reflections on that. In answering that question, it would be helpful if you could set out what you understand “community” to mean and, moreover, what community empowerment looks like to you.
I will start with the Minister for Community Wealth and Public Finance.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Ariane Burgess
I agree that that is absolutely what we need right now, in the transition that we are going through as we move to fulfil the aspirations of the community empowerment agenda. It is about how we get there and having that additional support in place.
Councillor Heddle, did you want to come in, or shall we move on?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Ariane Burgess
You are happy to move on. Okay—super.