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 3259 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Professor Bell, is the pace of progress adequate, given the situation that we are in at the moment, or could the Government do more to accelerate work on delivering its priorities?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Kenneth Gibson
I am going to call our next witness Mr Lonsdale, rather than David. As four of the five male witnesses today are called David, that will make life a wee bit less confusing. We had a Richard on the earlier panel, just as a token, but you really have to be called David to give evidence here. For example, on previous occasions we have heard from David Eiser and David Phillips—there have been loads of Davids.
Mr Lonsdale, Vikki Manson touched on the regulatory burden, and you expressed concern about that in your submission. Will you expand on that a wee bit?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Kenneth Gibson
I am sorry, but I was going to let David Lonsdale speak first, because he was already discussing that topic.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Kenneth Gibson
In relation to the question that we asked about capital expenditure, one issue that you talked about in detail was transparency. You said:
“the Scottish Government should understand what effect its prioritisation of its capital projects will have on achieving its ambitions of growing the economy, improving public service and tackling climate change.”
However, you added:
“The Scottish Government should be transparent about these decisions, how and why they have been made and the impact they will have on public services.”
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Do you have concerns that the capital pipeline programme, which we were supposed to receive early this year, has been repeatedly delayed and will not now appear until after the budget?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Professor Heald, you have also expressed great concern about productivity. Where should the Government take forward its capital expenditure, given that you have been very critical of the reduction of capital expenditure in recent years, as allocated by the UK Government?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Kenneth Gibson
I remember visiting the Faroe Islands and being astonished at the low cost of building tunnels that were 10 or 20km long. At one time, we were talking about building a tunnel under the Forth bridge, which was costed at some ridiculous figure of about £2 billion. Years later, the Faroe Islands can build huge infrastructure projects for a fraction of that price. That is a very important point.
I have one final question to ask before I open up the session to colleagues. It is about tackling the climate emergency, which is one of the Government’s four priorities. Earlier this year, I and other colleagues attended a presentation by the Scottish Fiscal Commission in which it said that the cost to the public and private sectors in Scotland—obviously, this is not an exact science, given that we are talking about the period to 2045—would be a combined £185 billion. While much of that would have to be paid by the public sector, whether devolved or UK, a lot would have to come from the private sector. Per capita, that is a lot of money—it comes to about £35,000 each. Those figures were broken down by sector.
One point that the SFC emphasised was the fact that the longer we delay taking action on the issue, the more expensive it will be to mitigate it. Do you think that, in its budget, the Scottish Government should do more to focus on tackling the climate emergency and to make it clear how it is doing that in the various portfolios?
Professor Bell, you are looking skyward, so I will ask you first.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Kenneth Gibson
What would a wrong turn be, for example?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Kenneth Gibson
Of course.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 10 September 2024
Kenneth Gibson
In the 20th century, Scotland had the lowest population growth of any country on earth. I think that 2 million people migrated in the half century before this Parliament was established, so that is a long-term issue.
