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
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
No, Michael. The First Minister did not say that, at all. He never said that he would cut £636 million.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
This might be a kind of student debating point but, at the end of the day, the First Minister—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
Yes.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
Ivan McKee has been on a data-mining mission to address the gaps where data does not exist. You are right in saying that, without data, it is very difficult. Sometimes, it is the data lying underneath that you really need, instead of just the top-level data. We absolutely get that.
There is a tension between public bodies getting on with doing X, Y and Z, and feeling that that is their domain, and, because we are funding them to do this, our need to know that they are delivering in the most efficient way. Everybody has to play their part in ensuring that we are optimising the efficiency of every single organisation, whether through reform, shared services or digital. The interrogation of that perhaps takes place at a deeper level than previously.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
No. If there is a range of options to be had, a range of options would be put in front of us. No other options were available that would have the same impact on child poverty. Nothing else emerged in the discussions with child poverty organisations that was going to have that impact. We were given a very clear steer by child poverty organisations that this policy was the one thing that would make the difference in reducing child poverty levels. They had previously pointed towards an increase in the Scottish child payment, which would have been the other obvious option, but they said to us that, rather than do that, with all of the issues around cliff edges and its rubbing up against disincentivising employment and so on, targeting the poorest kids through the mitigation of the two-child cap was the single intervention that we could make that would have the biggest impact. It emerged in a way that there was—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
For those who are on pay as you earn, the system is the system and they will probably have quite limited interaction with it. For those who are self-employed and businesses navigating their way through the tax system, our agencies and HMRC work closely with Revenue Scotland to make sure that public information for taxpayers, whoever they are, is as clear as possible. Improvements can be made. That was a theme that came out of the tax strategy, and work is being done to simplify the information and make it more straightforward and easier to understand.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
For the £750 million, yes.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
What they do with the money is up to them. The distribution group will allocate to each of the 32 local authorities. It is then entirely up to them how they use that money.
Your point is well made. Local authorities commission social care services differently, for example. Whether they try to address some of that will be entirely up to them, but I suspect that it will inevitably come to their door anyway.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
Let me be clear: the work on the spending review has been kicked off, so we will not be waiting until after the election. That work will then go ahead at pace and I will work with the committee on the timetable for that, as it is a major undertaking. It is important to communicate with the committee and the Parliament on the spending review.
That line in the response was just a recognition that there is an election. Any new Administration, whatever its colour, will want to put its own stamp on spending plans. That line was just to recognise that the spending plans will be the spending plans until somebody decides otherwise. We can set out the detail of what we believe to be the right correlation of spending envelopes for what, and there may well be a shift—which is what a spending review is all about. We will have to take cognisance of the UK spending review, and there is a lot of chat about what the various envelopes might look like in the future.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
The resource spending review set a direction of travel, but we are now getting beyond that high-level direction of travel in order to force the pace. Perhaps we have recognised that things were not happening at a pace that we were satisfied with and that we had to do things differently, which is what Ivan McKee is doing.
