Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
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.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
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.
Search by MSP
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.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
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.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
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:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
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.
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Displaying 1005 contributions
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Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Neurodivergence
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Tess White
A few things that you have said have really resonated, and I thank you for the report. I want to pick up the point about what humans need to grow and thrive. Dr Crabb, you talked about working practices. My background is in human resources, and you touched on human factors and human factors engineering.
In your report, there is a very good section in point 2 of your 10-point plan, in which you raise some concerns about the ability of the population to concentrate and focus on daily tasks. You refer to factors—which you have also mentioned today—such as caffeine, psychoactive substances, alcohol and screen time as almost being our environment and the air that we breathe. Is there any world-leading research that is looking at that, and almost going back to the basics?
I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s; we drank water and we did not have all these other drinks. I understand that, for some people, 50 per cent of the energy that they consume comes from ultra-processed food. Is there any research out there that is connecting the dots and looking at the data on what you have been talking about?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Neurodivergence
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Tess White
They used to play outside.
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Neurodivergence
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Tess White
You talked about 45,000 people waiting for diagnosis, and I think that more than half of them are children. Is there a huge risk arising from the fact that people are going for private diagnosis, because, as you said, that means that their condition will be looked at in a silo and not holistically?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Neurodivergence
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Tess White
Do they need a diagnosis? You said that there could be multifactorial issues including diet, drinking and smoking, and those risk factors will need to be eradicated. Is data being recorded and kept to show that the person might not have ADHD and that it could be something else?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Neurodivergence
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Tess White
I am an MSP for the North East Scotland region.
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Neurodivergence
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Tess White
Noise is another issue, as Dr Boeing said. I wonder whether, when schools were designed to be open plan, anyone actually thought about the human factors.
I want to ask another question before I go on to my question about private diagnosis. An article on the consequences of ultra-processed foods on brain development, which is available on the National Library of Medicine website, said that ultra-processed foods contain
“elevated amounts of sugar, fat, sodium, food additives, and dietary emulsifiers”
and pointed out that a lot of what people are eating and drinking has an effect on development in the womb. Dr Boeing, you are nodding your head. Could you say more about that?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Tess White
I am referring to the short-life working group.
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Tess White
The way I interpret that answer is that not much has happened with the short-life working group. It has stalled and has not had much engagement, and it is almost as if it has been put to one side and that separate meetings have taken place with the Government. Is that a fair assessment?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Tess White
Not dissent, minister—dissatisfaction.
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Tess White
On that basis, minister, will you meet this committee again before the end of the parliamentary session to raise all the issues that you want to raise with the committee, which you have just mentioned, and to allow us—out of courtesy—to ask you all the questions that we wanted to ask you today?
