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 2588 contributions
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Mark Ruskell
Will Maurice Golden give way on that point?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Mark Ruskell
To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on how it is ensuring that the Covid-19 certification scheme records the vaccination status of people who received their vaccine outwith Scotland. (S6O-00788)
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 2 March 2022
Mark Ruskell
Along with those options, I welcome yesterday’s launch of the Transport Scotland app, which I think is targeted at Young Scot cardholders to enable them to migrate their existing cards over to the new under-22 entitlement. Will the minister say a little bit more about that? How many people might that benefit?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Mark Ruskell
I think that we have all been inspired by the work of the Children’s Parliament and by the creativity of young people. They often see links that we do not necessarily see.
I want to ask a detailed question about the assembly’s recommendations on aviation and some of the tax options in that regard. Is it your view that a frequent flyer tax, for example, could be brought in? That could operate alongside the air departure tax. Do you have any thoughts about how the air departure tax should be changed in order to apply it to frequent flyers?
Again, I guess that we could go into quite a lot of depth, so it might be an area for a longer conversation with Government. However, given the work that you have done so far, do you have any emerging thoughts on how we could change the tax regime for frequent flyers in particular?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Mark Ruskell
I thank all the assembly members for their incredible climate leadership. As a politician sitting on this side of the table, I find it pretty humbling. That is how it should be, so keep up the good work.
I spoke to some members of the French citizens climate assembly when they were in Glasgow at the 26th United Nations climate change conference of the parties—COP26—and they said that they were working quite closely with the French Government on a number of policy areas. Did the Scottish assembly discuss that sort of thing? Are there particular priority areas, such as retrofitting or public transport, in which you feel that you want to go a lot further in working directly with the Government? How would you want to do that? What level of engagement do you feel that you are able to have as you move forward?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Mark Ruskell
In recent months, we have seen successive warnings from the UK Climate Change Committee, the Government’s energy advisers and now the Climate Assembly about the urgent need to cut air miles. The assembly has made a clear recommendation that air departure tax should be raised for frequent flyers. Will the Government square up to that climate reality and make demand reduction for non-lifeline flights a central objective in its new aviation strategy?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
Maybe we could read that across to renewable energy, to see whether such an approach is possible there. Joël Reland, do you have any thoughts on that?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
I am thinking about some of the points that the witnesses have made and particularly about some of the creativity that we see in communities, the way that projects are set up and their history and diversity. Does that make it difficult to mainstream a particular model that can be taken to every health board across the country to show what such projects deliver, how to employ consistent monitoring and evaluation and how to develop assessments of the financial savings?
Is there a difficulty in trying to interface a grass-roots movement and grass-roots projects with some of the harder objectives and systems that the NHS, health and social care partnerships or community planning partnerships have? How do we get that creativity in communities interfacing with those who actually have the money in a way that can deliver the objectives in a consistent way?
I ask Robbie McGhee to start off from the perspective of his projects and how they have managed to negotiate that.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
That is interesting. When it comes to how that taxonomy is interpreted within the devolution settlement, within the UK and across Europe, where there are sub-state actors that are looking to invest in particular technologies, do you have any thoughts on how that might play out?
We are meeting in Scotland, which has vast renewable resources. If you were to devise a green taxonomy for Scotland, maybe by creating a financial centre for green investment in Edinburgh, what would that look like? Could that exist within an EU taxonomy that is perhaps tilted in a slightly different direction, or which emphasises some technologies over others? Do you have any thoughts on that?
09:15Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Mark Ruskell
The tracker is a really useful tool and a really useful summary for policy makers. It is exciting to hear that you want to overlay some of the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 and devolution aspects.
The tracker highlights financial services, greening finance and the development of a UK taxonomy. Where do you see potential divergence or alignment with the EU or other countries that are developing their own taxonomies? In the EU, there has been a strong debate about the inclusion of gas and nuclear in its taxonomy. Do you see an inevitable alignment there, given that we face similar energy challenges across Europe, or is there a different tilt or perspective with other countries that might end up getting wrapped up in some of the trade deals that the UK is looking to set up?