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 806 contributions
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Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Rhoda Grant
The croft house grant scheme is being cut by £2.1 million, and it looks as though the money that is coming out of the budget is to do with repayment of loans. Is that because no loans are being repaid, so the figure has fallen, or is that money going elsewhere? There is quite a big cut in that budget.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Rhoda Grant
I would welcome a review of the scheme, because people are coming to me and saying that they do not qualify for it. It is really restrictive, and we should also take into account issues around people’s salaries in the crofting communities. They might have several different jobs. A bank would not consider lending to them, but, because their income reaches a certain level, they do not get the grant.
The scheme really needs to be looked at, given that we have a housing crisis in the crofting counties. It offers a way of changing the situation, and it is disappointing to hear that you estimate that demand for the scheme is falling further when we know that the demand is increasing.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Rhoda Grant
Okay. Thank you.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Rhoda Grant
It feels to me that you are throwing good money after bad. When we visited the site, I felt that it needed to be rebuilt rather than patched up here and there, which might not work. There are different buildings in different places that are in different states of repair. Whereabouts in the budget should we be looking to find the funding for that? I am conscious that there is an election coming up, and we probably need to put something in our legacy report at the end of the session, so that the new committee can look at the issue. If we are going to have world-class science, we cannot have that taking place in a shed, which is basically what we have just now.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Rhoda Grant
I would be keen to know what the practical implications of that are. The carbon neutral islands project was a pilot to show the way forward on how we achieve being carbon neutral. Given the funding cuts, are we close to those islands becoming carbon neutral, or is that something that will just fall by the wayside?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Rhoda Grant
That would be useful, because one imagines that an awful lot of the work coming out of that project would require capital funding. For example, looking at community energy generation and insulation, and all the changes that require to happen in order for islands to be carbon neutral, it is hard to see how that can happen without capital allocations.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Rhoda Grant
Cabinet secretary, you will be aware that the committee visited the Aberdeen laboratories. It was pretty shocking, to be honest, given the state of repair and the number of buildings that were not in use. The lecture theatre was full of freezers and fridges storing various things. It was a pretty awful place to work in, and it was very difficult to see how the scientists there could work effectively. What stage are we at with the redevelopment of the marine labs? Is there money in the budget for that? What will happen? Things cannot go on as they are.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Rhoda Grant
Cabinet secretary, can you explain in more detail the reduction in capital funding for the carbon neutral islands project and the islands plan? What are the projections for those budgets in the light of the revised islands plan?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Rhoda Grant
We are obviously coming to the end of the parliamentary session, and this matter will be a problem for the committee in the new session. Like us, the new committee members might be totally unaware of the matter until it lands on their desks. It might be worth our putting it in our annual report and information for the next committee. At the beginning of the next session, it will have time to examine things in more depth. It could consider the matter in the first instance, rather than reacting to an SSI appearing, by which time it could be too late. We got information about the matter, but I am talking about the basis of the decision making rather than about what data is being collected at the moment.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Rhoda Grant
Amendment 86 would add to the list of measures that may be used by a community wealth building partnership to facilitate and support the
“generation, circulation and retention of wealth”
in the local economy. It explicitly recognises common good property as a strategic asset for community wealth building. The amendment seeks to ensure that relevant public bodies use common good property as part of their action plans to deliver community wealth building.
The Scottish Land Commission has explained that common good property is regulated by the Common Good Act 1491, which is still in force today. It provides the legal status for common good assets and created an obligation that they would be managed for the benefit of the citizens of what was then the burgh. Historically, common good property was given to the people of the relevant burgh. Over time, that property has largely been subsumed into local authorities. The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 introduced responsibilities for local authorities on the registration, use and disposal of common good assets. However, the way in which that has been interpreted varies widely between local authorities.
Reform of common good legislation must be addressed in the next session of the Parliament, but it would be a missed opportunity if the bill did not acknowledge the important role of those assets in generating local wealth. It would also help to add transparency on which common good assets are owned by local authorities and how they could be better used to promote local wealth building, not least through transfer to community ownership in some instances.
I welcome the Government’s support for amendment 86 and urge the committee to support it. It was lodged with the help of Community Land Scotland to ensure that local authorities consider those assets proactively and that they unlock their potential for social justice, sustainability and local prosperity.
