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 1696 contributions
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 25 October 2023
Claire Baker
Sorry, Mr Stewart, is it possible to make some progress? We are a bit pressed for time—
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 25 October 2023
Claire Baker
The bill makes some limited and fairly technical changes to diligence but we have heard calls to reform diligence against earnings. There have been suggestions that the amount that is protected should go up to £1,000 and that there should be a system of deductions that takes account of family size—I think that the Scottish Parliament report “Robbing Peter to pay Paul: Low income and the debt trap” recommended that second proposal. It has also been suggested that some flexibility for creditors could be introduced to the system so that they could reduce the amount seized from earnings if it helped to support the debtor with their liabilities.
Alan, you have done some work on that. Will you talk to the committee about it?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 25 October 2023
Claire Baker
Good morning, and welcome to the 26th meeting in 2023 of the Economy and Fair Work Committee. Our first item of business is to decide whether to take agenda item 5 in private. Are members content to do so?
Members indicated agreement.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 4 October 2023
Claire Baker
Of the five targets from last year, you exceeded the capital investment target. The target was £380 million but £620 million was realised. How did that come about? How was it achieved?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 4 October 2023
Claire Baker
I have another question before I let other members come in. I was going to ask if you will have to do more with less, but you have said that you will have less and that you are trying to change how you do things. What timescales are you working towards? There are real-terms reductions and inflationary pressures across the whole sector, so is the budget that you have been allocated sufficient to make the cultural and structural changes that you are looking to make?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 4 October 2023
Claire Baker
Colin Smyth and Brian Whittle have supplementary questions.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 4 October 2023
Claire Baker
Stuart Black, do you have anything to add?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 4 October 2023
Claire Baker
Before I bring in Ash Regan for questions, I will give our witnesses from Highlands and Islands Enterprise an opportunity to comment on the budget reduction. The proposal is for a reduction of 4.8 per cent, which you will have to manage as an organisation. How are you going to do that?
09:45Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 4 October 2023
Claire Baker
The committee would be happy to receive that in writing.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 4 October 2023
Claire Baker
Good morning, and welcome to the 25th meeting in 2023 of the Economy and Fair Work Committee. Our first item of business is a decision on taking items 3 and 5 in private. Do we agree to take those items in private?
Members indicated agreement.