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 740 contributions
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 27 November 2024
Murdo Fraser
Good morning. A lot of the questions that I was going to ask have been covered by others, but there are two things that I want to follow up on.
For the first question, I want to return to Daniel Johnson’s earlier questions and take a step back from all of this. When I look at the Tay cities deal in my area and some of the projects that have come out of it, I see the massive investment in, for example, the James Hutton Institute outside Dundee, which has been extremely beneficial, and the opening of the new Perth museum, which has been a tremendous asset to the city, with visitor numbers since its opening in April well exceeding original projections. It is a great success. My question, then, which I suppose is for Mr McInroy or Mr Mitchell, is this: if we had not had the city deals, would such projects have proceeded?
11:00Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 27 November 2024
Murdo Fraser
Did you want to add anything, Mr Mitchell?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 20 November 2024
Murdo Fraser
I want to follow up the sustainable aviation fuel issue, which the committee is really interested in and has pursued in previous lines of questioning, including with Ineos and PetroChina last week.
As it said at that time, it is also interested in the opportunity and it is part of project willow. Mr Thomson, you make a compelling case around the notion of repurposing the existing refinery and how it could be done at a relatively low cost. If you are right, why do Ineos and PetroChina not see that opportunity for itself?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Murdo Fraser
This is my final question. Are you still taking evidence, or have you concluded that work?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Murdo Fraser
All right—thank you.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Murdo Fraser
Good morning, gentlemen. I want to follow up on the question of sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF. You have mentioned project willow, which this also references, but opportunities to develop SAF at Grangemouth have been discussed for quite a long time now. From your perspective, how realistic are the prospects of our being able to develop SAF at Grangemouth?
11:45Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Murdo Fraser
What barriers need to be overcome to make that happen?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Murdo Fraser
It was interesting to see that you launched an investigation in July into the market for energy efficiency and low-carbon heating products. Will you tell me a little bit more about why you chose that area for investigation? What do you expect the outcomes and impact will be from any findings that you have?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Murdo Fraser
Thank you. That is really helpful. Part of the reason why I asked the question is that I have had a number of constituency cases in which individuals have claimed that they were, in effect, mis-sold technologies. It certainly seems that companies have come in and made lots of promises about what will be delivered, but the outcomes have not been what was anticipated.
Part of the complication in this space is that there are various Government schemes that provide funding, and there is an assumption on the part of consumers that what they are offered is somehow an official Government scheme. When it turns out badly, they come to me and say, “Will you raise this with the relevant Government department?”. The Government department says, “Well, the delivery of the scheme has nothing to do with us. We just provide the funding.” There is clearly a perception issue, is there not? People think that, because there is Government funding, what they are offered is somehow an official Government scheme, even though it is delivered by a range of third-party contractors who might or might not be up to scratch. Are you looking at that area?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 13 November 2024
Murdo Fraser
You might not know the answer to this, but is it currently the case that, if somebody is accessing funding through a Government scheme, there is an accreditation for whoever is doing the installation?