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 1784 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Shona Robison
Let me just put on the record, convener, that the GERS figures are based on the current constitutional arrangements and all their constraints. They take no account of the levers that we would have as an independent country or, indeed, if we had additional economic levers. GERS demonstrates the constraints of the current constitutional arrangements very well.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Shona Robison
Is that in relation to what we should accept or should not accept from the Scottish Fiscal Commission?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Shona Robison
Before I come to that, I will say something further about your previous question. All the advice in the round—whether it is the factual advice that the SFC has given us, the options that have been put through internal processes or the work and advice of the advisory group—have led us to make the decision that we have, in order to provide certainty for the remainder of the current parliamentary session on any further changes to income tax. The result of all that was a decision that we had gone as far as we could. Others will disagree with that, but it was the balanced view that we came to in the light of all the evidence. We heard the range of views and that is where we, as a Government, landed.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Shona Robison
Yes, that remains to be seen.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Shona Robison
We are giving thought to how to involve the public more in that and make it a dynamic event, rather than something that is quite dry and just for people who are in that field. We are putting thought into that and the overall structure of how we might—
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Shona Robison
It is something that we should not discount. The starting point is usually the baseline. For the obvious reason, so much of the devolved spend is tied up in parcels that are the big chunks of spend—health, local government and social security. If we took a zero-based budgeting approach to health, for example, we would quickly reach the position of saying that, in order to keep the service functioning, it requires this level of funding.
Does that mean that we should not ask ourselves some fundamental questions about the outcomes for the chunk of funding that goes to local government, health, social security and everything else? We should ask ourselves those questions. Previously, we have attempted to have challenge in the system on why we are spending money on something and on what it delivers. It is, however, quite difficult to start with a blank sheet of paper when you have systems that you must operate. People expect to receive services. There cannot be a pause on all of that, so there is some essential spend.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Shona Robison
One of the things that we were considering was the future of the advisory group and its future role. I can write with further detail on this but I recollect that, at the most recent meeting, I asked the group’s members about its future and its role, and about what might be appropriate, given the position that we had reached. That discussion is still on-going, but I will write to the committee with an update of where we have got to.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Shona Robison
We have an annual debate about “Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland”, because the GERS figures are based on the current constitutional arrangements rather than on the opportunities that would come from Scotland being able to make its own decisions on tax and use economic levers that we do not currently have. Goodness—if ever we needed an example of why that matters, we could look at what happened to the fishing industry this week. These are points of principle that we clearly disagree on. You are not in favour of the movement to Scotland of any further powers, and I take a very different view.
We would need to get into the detailed work on what we were talking about. For example, if the UK Government were willing to have a more general review of the fiscal framework, we would identify what powers and levers we were talking about and, at that point, do the detailed work of asking what that would mean for Scotland under the current arrangements. In the absence of any of that, full fiscal autonomy is a principle that we adhere to, but—
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Shona Robison
That is under the current constitutional arrangements, which says quite a lot about those arrangements—
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Shona Robison
I am trying to think through what such a statement would contain. It would have to be fairly general in nature, otherwise we would, in essence, be doing the same thing twice, and I am not sure that that would be the best use of time. If there are big changes—for example, if something happens that will have a major impact—it is important to bring that to the attention of the Parliament. I would always try to do that, as we have done previously, if something was going to have an in-year impact.
