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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.

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.

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Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]

Land Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2

Meeting date: 3 June 2025

Mercedes Villalba

Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]

Land Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2

Meeting date: 3 June 2025

Mercedes Villalba

I am pleased to speak to amendment 43 and my other amendments in the group. I again thank Community Land Scotland and the Scottish Parliament legislation team for their support in drafting the amendments.

The bill makes it clear that provisions for land management plans, lotting limits and transfer tests will apply to single, composite or contiguous landholdings. As it stands, that means that non-contiguous landholdings that are over the threshold will not be subject to the effects of the bill and that a single owner of multiple holdings that amount to many times the size of the large landholding threshold will be unaffected by the bill. However, the stated purpose of the bill is to address the national concentration of land ownership across Scotland. The Scottish Land Commission found that aggregate holdings and complex ownership structures pose challenges for transparency and applying the bill’s provisions.

11:45

My amendments 43 and 47 therefore seek to remove the limitation that holdings must be contiguous, thus removing loopholes around non-contiguous landholdings and ensuring that aggregate landholdings that are over the threshold will be included in the scope of the bill. If the amendments are agreed to, they will ensure that aggregate landholdings are included in the land management plan requirements, prior notification requirements and public interest test requirements, while removing the loophole of landholdings being severed by infrastructure.

The amendments would remove the requirement for landholdings to border each other and ensure that large landowners of multiple holdings across the country are within the scope of the bill. Amendments 43 and 47, taken with amendments 122 and 125 in group 10 and amendments 140 and 145 in group 12, therefore seek to remove loopholes in relation to contiguous landholdings and include aggregate landholdings.

Bob Doris’s amendment 182, which is in group 16, would introduce a duty on Scottish ministers to regularly review the thresholds. It is vital that we future proof the legislation to sustain the direction of travel towards greater diversification of land ownership. My amendment 109 therefore seeks to amend proposed new section 44M of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 to specify that

“Regulations ... must not increase the number of hectares in area that land must exceed for obligations to be imposed on the land.”

Amendment 109, taken with amendment 133 in group 10 and amendment 171 in group 12, would ensure that thresholds may not be revised upwards.

Labour supports Ariane Burgess’s amendments 3 and 4, which seek to lower the threshold to 500 hectares. I have long campaigned for that and we welcome the Greens’ support for it.