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 1182 contributions
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 10 February 2022
Willie Rennie
Will the member give way?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 10 February 2022
Willie Rennie
Will the member take an intervention?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 10 February 2022
Willie Rennie
Liz Smith will have seen that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has issued a winding-up order against the division of Liberty Steel, which could have implications for the workers at Clydebridge and Dalzell steelworks. Does she think that the finance secretary should address that in her closing remarks and give clarity on the disputed guarantee for the potential clean-up of the site?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 10 February 2022
Willie Rennie
Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 10 February 2022
Willie Rennie
On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I seek your guidance on the potential misleading of Parliament by a minister.
The national transition training fund was launched in October 2020 by the then minister, Fiona Hyslop, who said that the initial £11 million phase of the fund would help up to 6,000 people by March 2021. It was targeted at unemployed people. In a debate in November last year, I had an exchange with the minister Jamie Hepburn on the fund and the Government’s failure to meet the target of 6,000. That exchange was based on a media report earlier in the year, in which Mr Hepburn said:
“3000 places have been awarded”.
In the debate, Mr Hepburn intervened on my point about the failure to meet the 6,000 target for strand 1, to correct his own claim and to claim that the number was now 9,000. However, in today’s report from the national transition training fund, we discover that the number for strand 1 is not 9,000, 6,000, or even 3,000, but actually 1,206.
The minister claimed that the scheme was a success and that it had exceeded its target by 3,000 places, whereas, in fact, it had fallen short by 4,800—failing 4,800 unemployed people in their time of need—and the minister had potentially misled the Parliament on the scheme’s success. As is often the case with the Scottish Government, the talk is better than the action.
Presiding Officer, can you set out what avenues there are for ministers to correct the record?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Willie Rennie
We need a bit more urgency from the health secretary. In my constituency, the level of recruitment of health and social care workers is dire. Just this week, there are 36 advertised vacancies in social care and 176 vacancies in the NHS. Is that not the result of poor workforce planning and poor rates of pay in the social care sector?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Willie Rennie
Patience on the issue is running out. In 2012, the Government promised to eradicate homelessness within months; 10 years later, 7,500 children were found to be in temporary accommodation. When will the Government meet its promise to those children?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 8 February 2022
Willie Rennie
I have read the cabinet secretary’s letter. The proposal was not an example: it was costed. It was costed for 2,000 classrooms at £150 a time, which is £300,000. The cabinet secretary is now being laughed at across the country for her proposals. She should ditch them and, as Michael Marra said, invest in air filters. If they are good enough for 2,000 classes, they should be good enough for 50,000. She should invest in air filters and stop the nonsense about cutting the bottoms off doors.
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Willie Rennie
In light of what the minister has said, the sooner we get to firmer proposals, the better. I am keen to advance the proposal for a train station at Newburgh, which is strategically important for Newburgh as it is disconnected from many other parts of Fife and Tayside. A vibrant community campaign is backing the bid. Will STPR2 make the construction of that train station more likely?
Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)
Meeting date: 2 February 2022
Willie Rennie
Every 19 minutes, a household becomes homeless. By the time that this debate ends, another four households could be homeless. Last year, 27,000 people were classed as homeless. In addition, 13,000 householders are stuck in temporary accommodation, including—this is shameful—7,500 children.
That is despite the repeated promises of the Scottish National Party, which has been in power for the past 15 years, of action on homelessness. In 2007, the Scottish Government promised to tackle homelessness. In 2012, it passed legislation to end homelessness within months. The Deputy First Minister at the time, Nicola Sturgeon, said that the legislation was Europe’s most progressive homelessness legislation. It would have been progressive if it had actually ended homelessness; it did not, yet the Government persisted in calling it an “historic homelessness commitment” and then a “world-leading homelessness target”.
Homelessness continued at embarrassingly high levels. In 2018, the Government moved to an action plan; that became the “Ending Homelessness Together” action plan in 2019, an end to “ghettoisation” in 2020 and “a continuing national priority” in 2021. As is always the case with this Government, the words are grander than the action. Therefore, members will forgive me for being a little bit sceptical on the latest commitment to a new prevention of homelessness duty. Apparently, the plans are “ambitious” and include new “legal duties” and a
“human right of an adequate home for all”.
Of course everyone is going to support the bulk of those proposals—who would not?—but it is action that counts.
With regard to Shelter’s concerns, I am puzzled as to why, if there is no difference between “permanent” and “stable”, the word cannot just be changed back to “permanent”. That would assure Shelter that there is no dilution of statutory rights in Scotland. If there really is no difference, let us stick with the wording that we are used to.
It is right to pursue early intervention and a person-centred approach, but for the thousands of people who are classed as homeless or living in temporary accommodation, those are just words, to be frank. What counts is action.
The work that was done at the outset of the pandemic shows what could have been done if we had set our minds to it. We got lots and lots of people off the streets. It was immediate action—the money was found and the difference was made. However, the reality is that, for years before that, funding had been cut—by 18 per cent, according to the Salvation Army.
Jeremy Balfour is absolutely right about this year’s council budgets. Supposedly, there is an extra £120 million; in reality, hundreds of millions of pounds have been cut. Most embarrassingly, the cabinet secretary does not seem to be bothered enough to make the case to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy for an increase in that funding. She is asking other people to do her job for her.
We have heard about the 256 people who died while experiencing homelessness in 2020. That is one of the highest figures in western Europe and an increase of 40 deaths compared with the previous year. Failed policies on drugs, mental health and housing, with long waits and inadequate services, have produced that figure. If people are living on the streets, sofa surfing or shuttling between temporary accommodation, that takes a huge toll on their mental and physical health and on children’s education and development. It stops people getting on in life. I live in hope—