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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 1757 contributions
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Douglas Lumsden
Why not? The front page of The Press and Journal today says:
“SNP must ditch its stance on oil and gas future”.
How do we know where we are going as a country if we do not have a strategy?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Douglas Lumsden
With a presumption against oil and gas, I presume that there will not be any spend to help the oil and gas sector.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Douglas Lumsden
I will move on to carbon capture and storage, for which £80 million was pledged in 2022. I do not think that any of that has been spent yet, and there is nothing in the 2025-26 budget to support CCS, is there?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Douglas Lumsden
But you could be spending that money to get the cluster ready for when track status—
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Douglas Lumsden
But money could be spent to improve the supply chain.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Douglas Lumsden
Surely, we should not be getting to net zero by switching off our manufacturing industry. That is the basis of Jim Ratcliffe’s comments in the article that was published yesterday.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Douglas Lumsden
So, you do not have any concerns that our manufacturing industry is closing down because of the regulations that have been put in place by the UK and Scottish Governments.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Douglas Lumsden
I will be brief, convener.
I will follow on from Monica Lennon’s questions. For the first four years of the just transition fund, up to £90 million will be made available, which leaves about £410 million for the remaining six years of the fund, so the annual amount would go from £15.9 million up to about £68 million a year after 2025-26. Is that feasible, when we do not have a just transition plan?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Douglas Lumsden
Okay. We will move on to hydrogen. A £100 million hydrogen action plan was announced a few years ago. How much of that has been spent?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Douglas Lumsden
I have a quick question on ScotWind, first of all. You mentioned the one-off payment, which was £700 million. It seems that the Scottish Government is using that almost as an overdraft; if there are in-year pressures, it will dip into that money and put it back later. You mentioned annual revenues, too. You say that you do not know how much they will be, but do you know when they will start feeding into the Scottish budget?