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 2643 contributions
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Mark Ruskell
What is the top thing that you want to come out of the strategic transport projects review? Is it a mass transit system, which might occur in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the years ahead, or something else?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Mark Ruskell
Can I get Susan Aitken’s reflections on that?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Mark Ruskell
Can we have the Dumfries and Galloway perspective, too, please?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Mark Ruskell
I will ask both of the witnesses about transport. I am sure that we could do an hour on that, but we do not have the time. I will break it down a little. The first panel talked in an urban context about how we get road traffic reduction, including issues of equality. The situation that your two councils are in is different, in that you have urban centres but you also have a wider rural population. Where can you get the biggest reductions in emissions when it comes to transport policy in your areas? What are you focusing on for those urban populations and rural populations? What infrastructure projects are you carrying out and what partnerships and equality approaches are you taking to get the carbon reduction for both types of settlement in your areas?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Mark Ruskell
I thank the witnesses for their contributions.
I will focus on transport. Witnesses have mentioned some of the challenges around transport and its contribution to climate emissions reductions. I am interested to know what approaches you are taking to road traffic demand management. Do you have all the tools in the box, and are you willing to use them, to drive down mileage, in particular to meet the Government’s target for 2030?
Perhaps Adam McVey can start. We are coming up to 20 years since the Edinburgh congestion charge referendum. If the proposal had gone through and a charge had been put in place, would the city look different now in terms of traffic and levels of investment in infrastructure?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Mark Ruskell
Do you see it as all carrot and no stick? Is there a balance?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 11 January 2022
Mark Ruskell
How does your council interpret the road traffic reduction target for 2030? Do you see that as being primarily about reducing mileage within cities, or will you focus on trying to reduce the more long-distance mileage across the region?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 23 December 2021
Mark Ruskell
Thanks to the United Kingdom Home Office, vulnerable refugees in Scotland will be spending Christmas warehoused in run-down hotels, including in Perth. Such institutional accommodation has no place in Scotland. It harms people who are seeking asylum, infringes their basic human rights and has been described as being like prison.
Will the First Minister provide an update on any correspondence that the Scottish Government has had with the Home Office on using hotels in that way?
Meeting of the Commission
Meeting date: 22 December 2021
Mark Ruskell
Do you see any way of reducing that figure in the future?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 22 December 2021
Mark Ruskell
My point was about the critically low water levels in many of our areas, which are exacerbated by Scottish Water’s decisions to restrict outflows to water bodies such as Loch Venachar. How can we encourage SEPA to review Scottish Water’s licences to ensure that it carries out appropriate assessments of potential damage to the environment when it makes such decisions?