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 1153 contributions
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 February 2024
Emma Harper
I will be moving and speaking to amendments 85, 86 and 87, in the name of Jim Fairlie, who is now the minister.
As the committee’s stage 1 report indicated, the monitoring and reporting requirements must be balanced against any resources that the Scottish Government and its agencies, and wider interest groups, require to carry out that work. In the previous minister’s response to the stage 1 report, that minister stated that the Scottish Government was committed to an open and transparent approach to legislation. Where additional reporting serves a useful purpose, the Scottish Government has said that it is happy to support it, which I welcome.
Amendments 85, 86 and 87 will require monitoring of section 16AA licences and their effect. Part of the reason for the bill is to address raptor persecution on land managed for grouse shooting, and the Scottish Government wants to do so through the section 16AA licensing provisions. The Werritty review identified three raptor species populations as being significantly impacted by criminal activities on some grouse moors: the golden eagle—indeed, there have been criminal investigations into the persecution of those birds in my South Scotland region—the hen harrier and the peregrine falcon.
To assess the bill’s effectiveness in reducing raptor persecution on those raptor species, regular monitoring and surveillance of their populations will be essential, and I acknowledge the Scottish Government’s commitment to doing so. When Gillian Martin was the minister, she stated that some monitoring of raptor populations was already undertaken by the Scottish Raptor Study Group, and my office has been in contact with the group ahead of this consideration.
Based on the evidence that the committee has taken, I strongly believe that the requirement to undertake raptor population assessments is important, and I would welcome the minister’s comments on these important amendments on monitoring.
I move amendment 85.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 February 2024
Emma Harper
Good morning, everybody. I have no interests to declare.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 21 February 2024
Emma Harper
Would the member take an intervention?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 February 2024
Emma Harper
This is to get clarity regarding consultation on the instrument. The policy note says that a six-week public consultation was launched on 17 July and closed on 28 August. Food Standards Scotland did not receive any responses to the consultation, but the Food Standards Agency received 13. I would be interested to know why Food Standards Scotland did not receive any responses and why the Food Standards Agency received 13. I know that the agencies work closely together to obtain information, but I would be interested to know how they publicise consultations. Do agencies write to the people whom they expect would respond? I would be interested to get a wee bit of clarity on why zero responses were received to Food Standards Scotland’s call for information.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 February 2024
Emma Harper
Michael Collier talked about time and task; I am thinking about rural areas where it might be better for councils to do one one-hour visit rather than driving to four 15-minute visits. I know that Dumfries and Galloway Council did a pilot on that. How would you see that being rolled out more widely to give more choice to people who are receiving SDS?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 February 2024
Emma Harper
In May 2023, the Government published its plan, “Self-Directed Support Improvement Plan 2023-27”. One of the chapters is entitled “What is different about this Plan” and another is entitled “How will we know the Plan is working?” I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the Government committing to doing an annual report to look at what has been taken forward, because there are a lot of extremely complex areas when it comes to SDS. An idea that I had was that SDS could be embedded in the education of social care workers.
What are your thoughts on the improvement plan? How can we measure how successful we have been in addressing the complexities of care, whether people are at home, in the community or in a community hospital?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 February 2024
Emma Harper
Do you think that the lack of uptake of option 1 might be because information on it is not provided? Does wider information need to be put out about the four options and how people can make their personal choice in order to decide for themselves and have more empowerment and control? I will look at the details of the age information. It looks like people between zero and 17 have a higher uptake of option 1 and people between 65 and 75 choose option 3. It might be about how the options are sold to people.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 February 2024
Emma Harper
Good morning. From quickly looking at the data on people choosing option 1 to option 4, it looks like option 1, which involves a person being an employer and having someone coming and supporting them with care, is chosen least. Option 3 is basically a mixture of choices from option 1 through to option 4. In our papers, there are issues relating to stress that might be caused by being an employer. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on that. I will go to Julia Smith first. Option 1 seems to be chosen least, and it looks like option 3 involves the local authority choosing. Is there stress associated with having a personal assistant?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Emma Harper
Good morning. I want to pick up on what Dr Pete Cheema said about education being the way forward. I have been looking at the work of Henry Dimbleby and Chris van Tulleken on the problems that are caused by ultra-processed foods and how education is not the only answer, because we need to tackle stigma and to support people to lose weight.
In relation to alcohol dependence, what opportunities are there for supermarkets—I am thinking of the big ones that are not here today—to change their model of selling to one that is similar to what goes on in Ireland, for instance, where there are shop-inside-the-shop off-licences? Would that give us an opportunity to look at how we support people?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Emma Harper
Has the pandemic affected our ability to capture further evidence? It obviously informed the way in which some evidence was gathered. As Justina Murray described, there were higher levels of drinking during the pandemic. Do we need to continue with minimum unit pricing in order to get further robust evidence? I see that Alison Douglas has her hand up.