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 1784 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
If it would be helpful, we could come back to you with more information on the profiling.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
I expect it to be reasonable. I will not put a figure on that. We have, of course, listened to COSLA. Local authorities wanted flexibility on council tax, so we have given them that.
We have increased the general revenue grant by £253 million. I have had a debate with COSLA in which it has criticised the level of social care funding. I could have hypothecated that £253 million for social care, but I would then have been accused of ring fencing money rather than giving local authorities flexibility.
The £253 million is in the general revenue grant, which can be used for social care or any other priorities for local government. Of course, we are supporting social care—the latest figure is £2.3 billion, including funding for the real living wage.
The £750 million of new money for social care that COSLA asked for just did not exist. I was very up front with it in the discussions that we had. That quantum is more than the entire resource consequentials for the spending review for one year. The money just was not there.
Do I accept that there are pressures in health and social care partnerships? Absolutely. We require to address those, and we need to work together to do so. However, I cannot provide money that simply does not exist.
What I have provided is a fair settlement for local government that represents a real-terms increase. There is a debate among commentators about what the level of the real-terms increase is, but everybody has accepted that there is a real-terms increase.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
On enterprise funding, there are some in-year movements, but we have done more to give the agencies more flexibility. Scottish Enterprise set out a programme of transformation that it wanted additional flexibility to deliver, and it has been given that. It is a reasonable budget in the light of our constraints, and Scottish Enterprise has an ambitious programme of reform to get on and deliver.
09:00
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
I can bring in colleagues to talk about the detail, but there is a significant uplift in the funding for the affordable housing supply programme. Of course, it is part of the overall £4.9 billion of investment over the next four years. With housing in particular, it was important to give certainty beyond a one-year figure.
You have pointed towards a significant uplift for this particular year, convener, but it continues over the four years. I should say that £4.1 billion of that is public money, while the other £800 million will be private investment levered in to grow the pot for delivering the target of 110,000 affordable homes by 2032.
I will ask Richard McCallum to confirm that this is FT and capital funding.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Shona Robison
The whole point of having a draft plan is to hear views then reflect that feedback, particularly where there is consensus on issues.
The Scottish Government regularly meets the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to discuss net zero issues. COSLA is a member of the climate change plan advisory group, which has contributed to the development of the draft plan. There is that direct and fundamental connection to the draft plan that is in front of you.
As you know, local authorities are independent of the Scottish Government, but the draft plan outlines the direction of travel across seven sectors of the economy that ministers consider to be necessary to reduce our emissions and contribute to delivering net zero, particularly by reducing emissions from heating buildings. Transport and waste are particularly relevant to local authorities and their responsibilities.
We consider the information in the draft plan to be particularly relevant and useful to local authorities in deciding how they will contribute to the delivery of Scotland’s climate change plan and achieving net zero.
We are also working with local authorities to take forward the climate delivery framework, which aims to enhance collaboration between local and national Governments to effectively address climate change and achieve net zero targets by 2045.
Relevant work under that framework includes the improvement of data and climate-informed decision making through the roll-out of the Scottish Climate Intelligence Service and the development of an overview of the various net zero commitments and targets that have been set by individual local authorities. We are also working with COSLA to deliver workshops for local authorities to discuss the draft plan.
I hope that all that will help to clarify expectations. That does not mean that all 32 local authorities will do the same thing and focus on the same thing. Urban local authorities will perhaps have a different focus from rural local authorities, which is absolutely fine. Some of the areas that I have described will help them to define what they are going to focus on delivering, and there are tools to make that happen.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Shona Robison
The honest answer is that, like everything else, 32 local authorities do not all move at the same pace. Whatever the area of delivery, there are always some that are further advanced than others. For example, heat networks in Glasgow are quite far down the road in respect of the financing, the models and how to test and make that happen, whereas other local authorities have not progressed so much. Part of that might be the size of Glasgow and the capacity that its local authority has compared with smaller local authorities. However, the sharing of information is important, so that, once something has been done, it does not have to be reinvented 32 times and there can be learning from that.
There are opportunities for collaboration between local authorities. That will be important in thinking about district heating systems and technology. Things are being done that could be delivered across more than one local authority area. That is the way forward.
Some of the very small local authorities may need further support on how they can contribute. The support that I have referred to—there is also other support—can help those smaller local authorities to define what they are going to do and how to do it. It is fair to reflect on that.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Shona Robison
I will ask Gareth Fenney or Phil Raines to take that question.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Shona Robison
That is a fair challenge, and we must continue to work to get out of siloed funding. It is quite difficult to do that, because of the way in which budgets work, but we absolutely should do it, and there are great examples of place-based funding approaches. Granton, which I have mentioned, is a good example of various parts of government and various funding streams being brought to bear in a locality in a way that can be more impactful than the sum of its parts. It is looking at land, housing, transport, renewables and even artworks. We are bringing together a huge number of different parts of government to focus on a place that will be really important for growth, for housing and for the Edinburgh city region.
We can build on that good example and take a place-based approach more generally to ensuring that our funding goes further and is more impactful. We can get better at doing that, if I am perfectly honest.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Shona Robison
I suspect that those discussions are getting picked up in the framework and in the workshops. My colleagues can speak to the detail of that. [Interruption.]
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 20 January 2026
Shona Robison
There are economies of scale with regard to price. Obviously, there are grants, as you have said, but the price of electricity is a major issue, and we have been pressing the UK Government on pegging electricity to gas and on the need for a renewable electricity price differential. The benefits to Scotland from that would be immense. I can reassure you that we regularly raise the issue with the UK Government, and there has to be movement on it.