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
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Shona Robison
That is a fair point of challenge. There must be a mixture of elements. For example, we know from all the analysis of child poverty that there are three pillars to tackling child poverty: money in people’s pockets, services and support in kind—things such as childcare and wraparound services—and work and employability. Therefore, there is not one solution, but money in people’s pockets matters, and all the analysis shows that the main driver of lower child poverty rates in Scotland is money in people’s pockets through the Scottish child payment.
There is a lot of important work going on in relation to employability, particularly with regard to supporting families. A lot of discrete work is being done by third sector organisations, and that is having really good results—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Shona Robison
I agree that work is the best way out of poverty, and it is important that we acknowledge that there is a lot of in-work poverty. A lot of people who are in poverty are working, and some of the supports that we provide are helping to support people’s household incomes. There is a wider debate to be had about wages being too low and whether the living wage is set at the right level. We have the statutory national minimum wage, and we have the Scottish living wage, but, for sure, we want to move to a higher-wage economy, because there are real issues in relation to in-work poverty, as we have discussed many times before.
With regard to the successes, each programme is analysed to establish its success rate, which will be based on how sustained someone’s employment is—how long they remain in a job—so that information is available, and we can provide it to the committee, if that would be helpful. For example, approximately 20 per cent of participants in the no one left behind programme are economically inactive at their start date; they are then tracked through the programme to see their outcomes and how long they are sustained in employment. We can provide that information, and it is fair to say that that should be part of the analysis to establish whether a programme continues to be funded. We do not want to fund programmes that do not work.
Some of those programmes are quite discrete. For example, a number of them work intensively with women. The MsMissMrs programme provides a lot of intensive support and has good outcomes, but it works with people for a long time.
I should have said at the start that we should remember that 80 per cent of the funding that goes into social security comes from the UK Government through the block grant, and UK social security is also increasing. The additional investment on top of that funding is where the choice comes in with regard to things such as the Scottish child payment. The bulk of the funding comes through the block grant.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Shona Robison
Richard McCallum may wish to come in on this point. A lot of the data has been interrogated to ensure that it is up to date and robust. A lot of commissions have gone back out to organisations to check the veracity of the information and to ensure that it is accurate.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Shona Robison
I will have to have a look. I am not aware of that article, convener. Where there is criminality, we would expect it to be pursued. However, I want to be accurate with the committee, so I will come back on that. We certainly would expect to make sure that there is full deterrent and that recompense is pursued, particularly if organised crime is involved, as we know that vulnerable people are often preyed upon by criminal gangs in this space. I will come back with clarification on the article.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Shona Robison
The point that I was making about the spending review was that, when it comes to day-to-day resource spending—and I note that most of the defence spending is on capital, so it is not part of resource spending—our increase in such spending is significantly less than the average for UK departments, and it will have a direct impact of £1.1 billion on our day-to-day spend. I have heard commentators who are by no means supporters of the Scottish Government or the SNP confirming that that mismatch of average increase in spend will have an absolute direct impact on our budget. Leaving aside the defence issue, I am afraid to say that that is the fact, and I regret that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Shona Robison
First of all, this is a concern for everybody, not least me, given that I represent a city where drug deaths have been a huge issue of concern.
A lot has been done in this space. We have the national drugs mission, which has been backed up by, I think, £100 million of additional funding, and there is now a lot of really important practice with, for example, the investigation of near misses and the roll-out of naloxone. Over the past five years, there has been a real improvement in the intelligence in this area of public health and in the rolling out of practice that has been shown to work.
Is there more to be done? There certainly is. Although there has been a reduction in drug deaths according to this morning’s statistics—as I understand it; I have not seen them—we still have a long way to go to ensure that we move on from the situation you have described.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Shona Robison
I thought that the figure included personnel, if you could locate them. That is a difficulty as well, because personnel are located all over the world and trying to extrapolate the Scottish spend is quite difficult. However, there was a mismatch of, if I remember rightly, £2 billion that cannot be reconciled. We could talk about GERS all day, but our contention is that the notional element does not bear a relationship to the actual spend—not just in defence but in other areas as well.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Shona Robison
I do not think that there is anything too alarming.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Shona Robison
Indeed—it is now.
One area that we are agreeing with the City of Edinburgh Council is the Granton funding landscape. The component parts are quite complex and have been funded from various bits, but there is a final bit of the jigsaw that needs to be put in place. In order for that to be completed, the City of Edinburgh Council is required to borrow, and we have agreed to pay the revenue costs of that borrowing.
That one example shows quite a pragmatic way of completing a project. It works for big projects such as housing and transport infrastructure, but I actually quite like it. It is a good way of ensuring that there is no one bit that is—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Shona Robison
We would want more spending on defence in Scotland. For example, “Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland” shows a disconnect between what was attributed to spending on defence in Scotland and the actual spending on defence. Anything that can remedy that by having investment in defence industries in Scotland is to be welcomed.
We would have some caveats to that. You gave an example of ships that are absolutely needed for defence purposes. There are some areas of defence that we would be less keen on. Obviously, spending on nuclear weapons is one such area, but in terms of spending on conventional defence—