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 893 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Craig Hoy
Pejoratively, I would say that the Government makes it up as it goes along.
You have called for the medium-term financial strategy to have a greater focus on how the funding gap will be closed. If the Government does not focus on that, where will we end up in two, five or 10 years’ time?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Craig Hoy
Would an example of that be the fact that, when the Government faced a shortfall in the recent budget, it took a scythe to housing and employability schemes, even though addressing those two areas is vital in eradicating poverty? Is that an example of the knee-jerk response that you are talking about?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Craig Hoy
Another issue is people working longer into their retirement. Anecdotally, people seem, post-Covid, to want to retire and scale back earlier. The graph of productivity by age is sort of humped, with those in the middle—say, those from 40 to 50—probably the most productive, because as you get older, you have skills obsolescence, a lack of reskilling and so on. What more can we do to ensure that those who are older maintain their productivity, so that, even if they are not working longer when they get into their 50s and 60s, they are perhaps still as productive as those in their 40s?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Craig Hoy
Good morning, Mr Boyle, and welcome to the committee.
We have talked about trying to be transparent and to put complex data and reports into more simplified language. You called for greater transparency in relation to budgetary information, to improve the effectiveness of the budget process. What would that greater transparency look like to a layman and how would you bring it about?
10:15Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
Craig Hoy
In your submission—I think that you have also made this point elsewhere—you said:
“the Scottish Government does not know where it can flex its budget easily to accommodate short-term fluctuations or longer-term commitments. A better understanding of its cost base would help develop its Spending Reviews”.
When I ran a private sector business, I had a detailed understanding of the cost base, because every pound spent unnecessarily was a pound less in profit. Why would the Government not have a detailed understanding of its cost base?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
Craig Hoy
Finally, you will have seen in the submissions from the Chartered Institute of Taxation and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland recommendations or calls for us to move to a system where we have a fiscal bill or a finance bill. My colleague Stephen Kerr said that a finance bill
“would consolidate tax and spending proposals into a single legislative package, providing a clearer, more coherent narrative of how revenue generation aligns with expenditure.”
From your perspective, based on your experience at Westminster and here, would that assist us in some way in tracking how the money is being spent and how tax aligns with expenditure?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
Craig Hoy
You referred to the need to look more into departmental spending rather than look only at the headline figures in order to assess sustainability. The Scottish Government frequently says that there needs to be a pivot to preventative spend, particularly in relation to healthcare—indeed, the Scottish budget is predicated on that. Can you deploy any tools or benchmarks to assess whether there is actually a shift in portfolios towards preventative spending rather than dealing with the consequences of problems that are already there?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
Craig Hoy
Politically, does the practice allow the Government, in effect, to announce the expenditure of the same money twice?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
Craig Hoy
That is useful to know. Most of what I wanted to cover has been covered, but I want to ask about the old chestnut of in-year transfers across portfolios. In your submission, you repeat the argument that those transfers
“should be baselined rather than done on a recurring basis.”
You say that the Scottish Government should do that to allow more meaningful comparisons to be made across portfolios.
The cabinet secretary gave us her account of why that is not happening—she said that the money that is spent by schools that relates to health will first go into the health budget and then be transferred. Is that a decent reason for making such in-year transfers, or is there another reason why the Government likes having the ability to make such large cross-portfolio transfers?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
Craig Hoy
I have a slightly more generic question, which relates to forecasting. What role is artificial intelligence likely to have in assisting you in the accuracy or the development of forecasting? Are you debating that in the organisation?
