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 982 contributions
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 29 June 2022
David Torrance
I adopted a cat 11 years ago—or I should say that a cat adopted me. I should never have fed it tuna and chicken. I must confess to pinching somebody’s cat a long time ago.
I would also like to write to the Scottish Government, seeking its view on the additional evidence that has been provided by the petitioner and SPICe regarding cat microchips and compulsory scanning, if that is acceptable to the committee.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 29 June 2022
David Torrance
I wonder whether the committee could write to the Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wealth to follow up on the outstanding issues from the evidence session on 15 June 2022—that includes any recent discussions that the Scottish Government might have held with the UK Government regarding the issues raised in the petition—and to write to the planning advisory service regarding the training that it provides to staff and volunteers supporting communities engaging in the planning process. I would also like us to write to the Scottish Government’s planning and environmental appeals division to ask what training and guidance is provided to reporters specifically in relation to how witnesses are treated during public inquiries.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 28 June 2022
David Torrance
Good morning, minister and Mr Kellet. Can you expand on the success of community link workers in the most deprived areas? How do we ensure that they have the resources to engage with other key sectors, such as the third sector, which is really important? Moreover, how do we get the information back from the third sector to show that they are having that success?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
David Torrance
We should write to the Deputy First Minister to draw his attention to the issues that are raised in the petition and ask that he consider adjusting the current eligibility criteria to allow Fornethy survivors, and other survivors with similar experiences of short-term respite or holiday care, to access the redress scheme.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
David Torrance
Good morning, minister. What is the Government’s view on the group’s definitions? Does the minister see any issues with not being definitive? The reason that I asked that is because when I asked Kelly McBride about that point, the group acknowledged that there was no one set of agreed definitions that could be used as best practice. How does the Government see that working?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
David Torrance
This is probably a key question for both petitions: does the Scottish Government have legislative competence to increase or abolish the 50MW threshold for renewable energy developments that can be considered by planning authorities and, if so, has that been considered? If it has not, have you spoken with the UK Government about devolving that power?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
David Torrance
I would like to close the petition under rule 15.7 of standing orders, on the basis that the Scottish Government is not currently considering an outright ban on smoking in favour of vaping.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
David Torrance
Does the Government agree that the commitments in the programme for government and the Covid recovery strategy can be more effectively delivered with routine use of participative democracy, and if so, how?
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
David Torrance
As a member of the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, I can say that we are finalising our work programme just now, so I would like to refer PE1845, PE1890, PE1915 and PE1924 to that committee, in the context of the committee’s wider consideration of health inequalities.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 15 June 2022
David Torrance
With regard to all the actions and international best practice that makes sense for the definitions.
10:30