It’s the end of a long and winding year. My colleagues and I have looked back and chosen a few of our favourite moments to share with you, and we’ve made them into a quiz. The questions are certainly obscure – even we don’t all know all the answers –  but we hope that you will have fun guessing and will be entertained along the way.

Click here to take the quiz.

We wish you peace and happiness in 2016. 

When the Parliament resumed in September, the days were long and the weather occasionally sunny – which was more than could be said of the summer. Six speedy weeks later, we’re going home in the dark and it’s recess again. Time is not just flying, it’s zooming by, and there is a growing sense of urgency around the Parliament as dissolution draws closer and the yet-to-be concluded inquiries, budgets and bills mount up. Looking over the term’s work, I couldn’t but be struck by the running theme of Scotland’s future.

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The Parliament passed the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Bill on Thursday 1 October. It is:

An Act of the Scottish Parliament to make provision about human trafficking and slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour, including provision about offences and sentencing, provision for victim support and provision to reduce activity related to offences.

Defending an amendment to secure the appointment of a guardian for children in Scotland who are at risk of exploitation by their parents, Jenny Marra MSP mentioned the tumbling lassie case: Continue reading →

Here we are in the final phase of the fourth Scottish parliamentary session. Our legislators will be very busy over the next eight months – there is a total of 30 bills on the stocks – and consequently, so will we.

Less obviously significant, but important to our readers, is a change that happened over the summer. The Parliament became its own publisher. That means that you will now see the words: “Published in Scotland by the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body” on all our publications. We are responsible for our own legal deposit, on which we are collaborating with the wonderful National Library of Scotland and their official publications team. And we will no longer use ISBNs to identify publications.

Ceasing to use ISBNs means that we need to be clear about the status of different editions of the Official Report. It is important to say at once that our practice has not changed at all: we invest huge skill in the first edition that we publish and endeavour to make it as accurate and timely as we humanly can. We’re not perfect however, so we offer anyone whose speech we’ve reported the opportunity to suggest corrections to the first published edition. We have decided to identify the first edition as a draft because we want it to be clear that there may be small differences between the text of the draft  and archive Official Reports. We aspire to there being no difference at all.

We aim to publish the archive edition about 30 working days from the date of publication. Why 30 days? The Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee instituted a members’ corrections mechanism to enable members to correct factual errors that they have made while speaking, and the deadline for requesting such a correction is 20 working days, so we can’t archive earlier than that. The remaining 10 days give us a little time in which to apply any corrections and republish the report.

How will you know when the report is archived? The word “draft” will disappear from the html title and the cover of the PDF.

In short, “Draft” means the report may be subject to change, and you can expect to see a finalised edition in just over a month from the date of the report.

If you have any questions about the status of a report, or you’d like more information about our processes, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

In the chamber

There has been a lot of complaint in the media that the general election is boring. Not in Scotland, it’s not. We could hardly feel more at the centre of things. The election focus that built up while members were out and about in their constituencies over the Easter recess continued as they returned to parliamentary business and I expect that we will only see more of it between now and 7 May. Continue reading →

Last week, the European and External Relations Committee continued its inquiry into how the Scottish Government engages internationally. Members heard from Christos Sirros, Agent-General of the Government of Quebec in London, Dr Paul Fischer from the Bavarian State Chancellery , Ian Campbell from the Scottish Government EU office and John Somers, first secretary of the Scottish affairs office in Beijing,  who appeared by videolink.

John Somers’s opening statement on his role and the work of the Scottish affairs office in China was fascinating. He concluded by introducing us to a new term and to the word for Scotland:

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