Chamber and committees

Official Report: search what was said in Parliament

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.

Searching by different views

The web version of the Official Report has three different views:

Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.

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.

Search by MSP

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.

Searching by keyword

There are two types of keyword search:

A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.

Combining search filters

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.

Searching by date

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:

Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
Last 6 months
Last 12 months
each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
All sessions
You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.

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.

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Criminal Justice Committee

Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Meeting date: 6 February 2024

Katy Clark

That is not what is being said. I have one final question. You said:

“There will, inevitably, be lower conviction rates”.

Are you saying that there will be similar conviction rates whether you have a jury or a judge-only case?

Meeting of the Parliament

Bankruptcy and Diligence (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Meeting date: 6 February 2024

Katy Clark

It is a pleasure to wind up the debate on behalf of Scottish Labour and to follow Ivan McKee, who was correct to highlight the financial struggles that many people in Scotland currently face.

In the previous session of Parliament, the Economy, Energy and Fair Work Committee recommended that the Scottish Government review the solutions available to people with problem debt. Scottish Labour supported that recommendation. Although we broadly support the provisions in the bill, we believe that far more needs to be done to address how we deal with people who find themselves in debt, particularly in a cost of living crisis. We believe that many other areas of bankruptcy law also need updating. There has been some discussion of that in the debate, in particular on the thresholds—for example, those applicable to wage arrestments. As a member who has not sat on the current Economy and Fair Work Committee, I would be interested to hear from the minister whether further proposals will be introduced following the recommendation made in 2019.

Scottish Labour has issues with some aspects of the drafting of the bill. We believe that many clauses are too widely defined, which we hope will be addressed through amendment. We agree that the Parliament needs to see the detail before stage 3.

As Daniel Johnson said, Scottish Labour supports the general principles of the bill. However, like many other members, I hope that the bill will be strengthened as it progresses. I was not involved in the scrutiny process for the bill. However, many of the criticisms that I heard in today’s debate, and which occurred to me when I looked at the black letter of the bill, I have heard many times about previous bills. There is a lack of detail on the face of the bill, and a similar lack of detail has been provided to the committee that is charged with scrutinising the bill’s proposals. It is not acceptable that the Scottish Parliament is so often put in that position. I hope that those criticisms will be addressed as the bill progresses.

As Colin Beattie said, much of the focus of the debate has been on the proposals for a mental health moratorium on debt recovery action. Scottish Labour supports, in principle, the establishing of such a moratorium, but much of the detail on how it would operate in practice has been left to secondary legislation. The minister made it very clear that the bill is enabling legislation. We believe that such detail should have been provided on the face of the bill. We hope that amendments will provide clarity as the bill progresses. However, if the bill remains much as it is currently drafted, we further hope that the affirmative procedure will be used for any secondary legislation, given the level of detail that will have to be incorporated in the regulations.

As Stephen Kerr and a number of Conservative members pointed out, the proposals that have been presented to Parliament potentially give people with mental health problems fewer protections than those applicable south of the border. I agree with Keith Brown’s suggestion that it would not be acceptable to simply mirror legislation south of the border—the law of bankruptcy is very different in Scotland, and always has been, from the legislation south of the border. However, it is completely legitimate to say that it would be shocking if we were to end up with poorer protections than those south of the border.

I agree with what Keith Brown said about the public register. Those are important points to put on the record, and I believe that the provisions on that need very careful consideration, given the human rights implications for those impacted, who are often some of the most vulnerable in our society.

The convener of the committee outlined the range of evidence that the committee took in order to engage with those who work in the debt sector and she made clear the committee’s disappointment at the lack of detail that was provided to enable the committee to carry out its role in scrutinising the proposals. She spoke about the small number of people who may benefit from the proposals, in particular in relation to the moratorium, and highlighted the high numbers of people who are in debt and who have mental health problems, as well as the high percentage of people who have mental health problems who are in debt. That point was well reinforced by Kevin Stewart. We note the representations made by Change Mental Health, which said that the eligibility for entering a mental health moratorium is too narrow; the committee convener reinforced that point.

We support, in broad terms, the proposals in the bill. In particular, we support the proposal to allow the minimal asset process bankruptcy to take place after five years. We think that that is consistent with the approach that has been discussed today to enable people who get into difficulty the possibility of a fresh start.

Murdo Fraser highlighted the lack of capacity in the debt sector. That very important point has been made by several members. In the past, there have been very strong representations in the Parliament for a debt amnesty for low-income families and those in receipt of benefits. There have been calls for debt advice levies on financial benefits and a range of extra resources for front-line advisers.

I believe that that issue is central to the debate, because whatever legislation we have in place, we have to recognise that those who are seeking to rely on the legislation are at a particularly vulnerable point in their lives; they are often very vulnerable people. It is essential that there is a framework around the legislation so that it can be used appropriately.

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