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 1278 contributions
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 11 June 2025
Pauline McNeill
It is useful to know that there is a common-law provision to allow parties to examine the item. I will speak to what I and Liam Kerr are driving at. If you think that it is in the interests of justice for the jury to see the weapon—if it is a weapon—it should surely be an unqualified right. There is a difference between examining something and it going before the court.
Criminal Justice Committee
Meeting date: 11 June 2025
Pauline McNeill
My amendment 51 would ensure that national jurisdiction can be used only for the initial custody hearing and, beyond that, only with the agreement of the defence. Following that, jurisdiction should remain linked to the locus of the offence. Simon Brown from the Scottish Solicitors Bar Association said that:
“The issue is the plummeting number of defence solicitors available to deal with this work, and the concomitant difficulties that places on being able to deal with cases outwith one’s normal practice area. If we were in a situation where I had a Sheriff and Jury accused out on bail for a case, and I assume that it would be prosecuted at Kilmarnock, I would be faced with considerable logistical difficulties were that matter to be indicted in, say for example, Greenock.”
My amendment 52 would ensure that national jurisdiction would end at the point of liberation on bail. Further to that, Simon Brown also said, when I asked him, that:
“The issue is, though, that those fully committed for trial and therefore remanded in custody are only a relatively minor percentage of solemn cases. The vast majority of solemn proceedings commence with the case against the accused being continued for further examination and the accused liberated on bail. We would require a similar undertaking that national jurisdiction would end at the point of liberation on bail to make the system workable.”
I welcome the cabinet secretary’s amendments 8 and 10, which provide the clarity that I was seeking at stage 1 about how far national jurisdiction would be allowable in relation to various proceedings. In simple terms, I think that that would not be the trial, but could be proceedings before that.
Although I am sure that I do not need to mention it again, you have heard from Sharon Dowey and from me about the crisis that we are experiencing in terms of the loss of criminal defence lawyers. That was mentioned in the press again this week. The Government does not seem to have taken that into account when legislating for national jurisdiction. We have to hope that everyone will be sensible about it and that we will not have lawyers or victims going up and down the country. It is less about victims, because the provisions relate to procedural hearings, but it will cause practical difficulties for defence lawyers and accused persons, particularly as people are leaving the criminal bar.
It is sensible to have national jurisdiction for custody hearings. My reading of the bill is that the default will be virtual appearances for custodies, which makes sense—you can see the efficiency in that. However, we must remember that national jurisdiction is about not just virtual but physical appearances. I am concerned about the practical impact on solicitors’ ability to conduct their business if they have to be in different sheriff courts for different things.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Pauline McNeill
It could be a mix.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Pauline McNeill
The policy note says that the financial impacts are
“anticipated to be unchanged as a result of the implementation of restitution orders.”
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Pauline McNeill
Is that possibly why there have been only 103 restitution orders?
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Pauline McNeill
I will follow up on what you talked about, Tracey, which has also been a running theme. We have all these documents and strategies and lots of things that we are doing really well but the prison regime is completely overcrowded—we are not unusual in that in Scotland, because England has the same problem. That overcrowding is stressing out the staff who run the services and is impacting on prisoners, most of whom, according to the survey, do not even get out of their cells for more than an hour a day and some of whom are doubling up—I do not know what that looks like, but that is the regime in which we are operating—so it is not easy. You said to Sharon Dowey that there is no consistency there.
It is shocking that a prisoner who has opted to go on a programme and is in recovery could be transferred to another prison, when everybody wants that recovery, including the community and the individual. That begs the question that I will ask Tracey first: instead of all the endless documents, is it time that prisoners had a categoric right to continue their rehabilitation or recovery? I am sure that other members feel the same. I get many letters from prisoners about the waiting list for rehabilitation. They cannot get on the list and they say, “I want to do things to get into recovery.” Is it time to take a different approach?
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Pauline McNeill
As you said, cabinet secretary, whether to impose restitution orders is a matter for the courts to decide. We have heard that there have been 103 such orders and that in a given case the court can impose either a fine or a restitution order. From what I have read, it seems that the amount of any restitution order should be broadly the same as that of any fine that the court might have imposed. Does that mean that the courts have complete freedom to decide which of those options they want to apply? Is there guidance on when a restitution order should be used, or are there any criteria for that?
10:15Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Pauline McNeill
I had not appreciated that a restitution order could be imposed as well as a fine. I have not looked recently at the repayment figures for fines. I know that, in the past, there have been problems with collecting fines—I do not know whether that is still the case. I would think that someone’s ability to pay might be a consideration. If a court imposes a fine and is thinking about making a restitution order, presumably it would use some kind of self-imposed criteria to decide whether the offender could afford that, otherwise we would not get the return on it.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Pauline McNeill
You said in your submission that provision depends on what prison someone ends up in. Do specific prisons not provide recovery programmes, or is it random? Are there specific prisons that you could point to and say, “If you get moved to that prison, you will not get a programme of recovery”?
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Pauline McNeill
Is it down to governors?