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 1960 contributions
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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of NHS Tayside”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Michael Marra
But surely there has to be consistency. Rachel Browne, have you seen in your examination of the issue evidence that the board has asked for, and is seeing, reports setting out progress against the 51 recommendations, or is the reporting against a whole system change programme that might represent some of them but not others and which includes things of different scope? Have we lost focus on the outcomes of the Strang report over the past six years?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of NHS Tayside”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Michael Marra
So, one of the responses of the new leadership team, which you have said is bringing in this different expertise, was to downgrade the scope of the programme. Part of its response to the crisis was to say, “Actually, we need to narrow the focus.”
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of NHS Tayside”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Michael Marra
Convener, I thank you and the committee for your forbearance and allowing me time to ask questions, and I thank the Auditor General for what is, I hope, a very useful report. You have highlighted, rightly, that there have already been an awful lot of reports from various sources.
To start with, I want to follow on from Colin Beattie and ask about delayed discharge. You have said that things are taking too long and that there is no clear plan in place. Ryan Caswell, a constituent of mine, has been a delayed-discharge patient for five years and 10 months in completely inappropriate settings. I have raised his case again and again and again and again, but there seems to be no progress in getting him out of that inappropriate setting and into another situation.
My question, then, is this: is the structure limiting progress? You have touched a little bit on the interaction between the health board and the IJBs. In the research that you have done and the work you have looked at, is the relationship between the IJBs and the health board just too intractable to deliver an outcome and make the change?
12:15Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of NHS Tayside”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Michael Marra
On 2 May, I asked the board when it will next examine the business case and associated costings for the move, and it has still not provided any indication of when it will do so. Has Rachel Browne or Eva Thomas-Tudo seen in their work any evidence that the board has looked at a revised plan setting out the costings for, and the impact of, such a move?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of NHS Tayside”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Michael Marra
I suppose that what I am asking—
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of NHS Tayside”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Michael Marra
You started the evidence session by talking about the issue of leadership, Auditor General, and the comment in the report about NHS Tayside having
“Limited skills and capacity for leading and participating in the”
whole-system change programme really jumps out. You have said that the board is trying to bring in a single member of staff to do that work, but can you say more about where that capacity and that capability are missing? Is it in the IJBs, or is it in the central leadership? What is the deficit that the board is trying to make up?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of NHS Tayside”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Michael Marra
Okay. Surely, given this changing environment, with different leadership over different periods of time, we should not be losing sight of those recommendations. They came out in 2020, and the progress report, which came back in 2021, has been described to me as
“the worst report in Scottish public life”.
As the convener has pointed out, it showed local bodies in Dundee misleading the public about progress that had not been made. We had the oversight assurance group in 2021, which reported in 2023, and now we have the whole system change programme.
All of that leads me to ask this question: do we not need external leadership to actually deliver this? The current model of leadership is just not working, is it?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of NHS Tayside”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Michael Marra
Is anybody reporting to the board on progress against those 51 recommendations in the report that was brought out? A lot of work went into that analysis. Are those things being reported on? I have to say that I cannot see any evidence that they are. They are being substituted by one programme after another, instead of someone saying, “This is the mission. We need to deliver it. How do we get there?” After all, we are now six years on.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of NHS Tayside”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Michael Marra
I want to stick with the issue of scope for a moment. Will the current scope of the whole system change programme meet the 51 recommendations of the Strang review?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 December 2025
Michael Marra
I will close by returning to the issue of public spending, which of course you comment on quite regularly. I am thinking about two of your reports: one entitled, “NHS in Scotland 2025: Finance and performance”, and another, published more recently, in November, which is entitled, “The 2024/25 audit of NHS Tayside”. The picture that both reports paint is of a Government that is unable to change services. There does not seem to be a process whereby it can deliver change and efficiency on the public spending side. If you are looking at a tripod of issues around tax and growth, but the Government is focused on the third leg—spending decisions—and it is not able to deliver on those, is it not a key issue of concern if that is its principal focus and you, as Auditor General, keep telling the Parliament that it is not able to deliver change and manage public spending effectively?
10:45