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 2160 contributions
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Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
The rural support plan is for the next five years and we will lay the SSI for it in the autumn. The changes in 2025 relate to the legacy systems that I just spoke about with the convener. We will develop the plans from there.
I think that you are asking what detail will be in the rural support plan. That will be developed as we go along. Just now, we are dealing with the legacy stuff and getting through that piece by piece.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
The rural support plan was always going to come from the route map. That was stated from the start. The rural support plan will be the final point, once we have dealt with the transition and everything else that we will go through from the legacy schemes.
I am possibly wrong in framing it in that way. The rural support plan will be what used to be the CAP. We had the CAP and we are getting to the point where we are coming out of it. We are trying not to create cliff edges; we are trying to give certainty to the farming community that it will continue to get support. We have consulted widely across the industry and with this committee. The end product of that will be the rural support plan.
As things develop, the rural support plan will likely change, in the same way that the CAP did when we were in the EU. It is not putting the cart before the horse; rather, it is ensuring that the cart is filled with all the things that need to be in it in the first place, because the cart will be the programme by which agricultural support is delivered. Does that make sense?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
I understand your point. It feels like the wrong way round. A lot of work has been done on this, and, as I said to Tim Eagle, we have come out of a hugely complicated CAP process, and we are trying to develop a farming policy that works for the people of Scotland and the farming community in Scotland. I accept that it has taken a long time, but I would prefer it to take a long time and for us to get it as right as possible, rather than for us to get what we have seen in other parts of the UK.
The alternative was for the Government to go ahead and make the decision, saying, “That is now your policy,” only to come back two years later, saying, “Well, it’s not going to work, so we’re going to have to try again.” That was the purpose of having the route map and the consultations, setting up the agriculture reform implementation oversight board—ARIOB—and doing all these things that have frustrated people. I understand that the approach has frustrated people, but it has got us to a position where I think everybody is fairly settled that we understand not only what agriculture is going to be given but what it is expected to deliver on the back of the public funds that it gets.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
The changes are not legacy—the whole-farm plan is not legacy. There will be a mix of measures under the 2020 and 2024 acts.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
We have consulted widely, and all those considerations will be fed into how we deliver our rural support plan. However, I think that you have something more specific in mind, but I am not sure what it is.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
What I have is an absolute determination to make sure that farming continues to function in Scotland, producing food and delivering the outcomes that the Government wants. That is my primary focus. Do I have a plan for it? Yes, we have a plan for it. Do we have a vision for it? Absolutely. However, there is no way that I can sit here today and say, “This is the plan, this is how it is going to work, this is what it will deliver and it is all going to work sweetly.” As we have been reiterating throughout this committee session, there are a number of different voices with different objectives and different perspectives on how this will work for them. Therefore, we have to put in the basis—what we have at the moment, which I think is a pretty good system—and then let it develop. That will help us to deliver the final rural support plan.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
The 70:30 split allows us to guarantee direct payments while asking for more from the farming community through the greening requirement, so that we have the promise that we will deliver direct support and demand more. The 70:30 split allows us to say to those in the farming community that we will continue to support them but that we need them to work with us to deliver more for those public funds. That is kind of where we are. I hope that that answers your question.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
The basic payment has been an essential base for the farming community, because they knew that it was coming. Is it a blunt instrument? Yes. Is it likely to change? Probably. Do I think that it was the right way to go from the traditional CAP? Probably not, because it did not achieve the objectives that it set out to achieve.
What we have here is an opportunity to work with the industry in order to get everyone in. I absolutely understand that people do not like changes—everybody is running at 100mph, and they are very busy—and I do know that the basic payment is a blunt instrument. However, it is an essential blunt instrument that allows us to give certainty to the farming community that we are going to continue to support them while, at the same time, saying, “We need more for that blunt instrument.”
09:45Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
They are under construction—I will put it that way. James Muldoon or Amanda Callaghan may have more information on where we are with that process.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Future Agriculture Policy
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Jim Fairlie
It is, yes. We are getting the payments out—the payments are being delivered. We are adapting that as we go along. We do not want to get into a position where it cannot deliver, so the system is being developed as we go along. It has gone through a real technical upgrade.
I will quickly read you the first paragraph of my notes, if that is helpful. Between 2022 and 2024, there was the largest technical upgrade to the payment service platform since its inception in 2014, and that was done via the middleware project. Upgrading the middleware, a layer of software that enables interaction and transmission of information between applications and services, has significantly enhanced the efficiency and security of the digital services.
It is technical stuff, but we know that it is working at the moment and it is allowing us to get payments out on time, which is what we will continue to do.
