You're very welcome. Thank you for asking us to talk to you.
I thought we would start just by giving you a bit of social and political context for Gaelic in the Scottish Parliament. It all starts with the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005. That's an act that establishes a body that has “functions exercisable with a view to securing the status of the Gaelic language as an official language of Scotland commanding equal respect to the English language”. The functions of that body include preparing a national Gaelic language plan, requiring public authorities to prepare and publish Gaelic language plans in connection with the exercise of their functions and to maintain and implement such plans, and issuing guidance in relation to Gaelic education.
That body is known as Bòrd na Gàidhlig, and it takes the lead in identifying actions that it believes are likely to support the use, the learning, and the promotion of Gaelic.
The Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body, which is our legal identity, is the named public authority in the Gaelic language act, which means that we have a duty to prepare a Gaelic language plan. We've just submitted the latest version of that to Bòrd na Gàidhlig. Its main aims are stated as setting out how we will use Gaelic in community outreach, how we will support MSPs and staff to develop confidence in using Gaelic, and how we will integrate Gaelic into the fabric of the Parliament's thinking.
The main responsibility for facilitating the implementation of that plan sits with the head of our outreach services. In addition, we've got two Gaelic officers who provide support for Gaelic in the Parliament and in parliamentary outreach.
You can see that we're in an environment that is very supportive of the use of Gaelic. However, it's not new. It's not only since the 2005 act. When the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999, the standing orders were written to say that the Parliament shall normally conduct its business in English but members may speak in Scots Gaelic or in any other language with the agreement of the presiding officer.
Those bare bones of the standing orders are filled out by the Parliament's language policy, and that provides the detail for how we will implement our ambitions to support the use of Gaelic in parliamentary business. More recently, the Parliament took a further step and passed the British Sign Language (Scotland) Act 2015, which places similar obligations on us to support the use of BSL.
Linda Orton, who is the head of public information and resources, can talk about the language policy and the interpretation contract. Ruth Connelly, who's our head of broadcasting, can talk about the services we need to provide, including technical facilities, to support multilingual parliamentary business. If you have any questions about the Official Report, which is what we call our Hansard, and it includes Gaelic, I'd be happy to answer those.
Thank you.