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 3805 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Kenneth Gibson
I completely agree with you, but there is an issue with the scrutiny. Someone—the clerk of works, or whoever—has to check that the work has been implemented to the correct standard.
Two years down the line from a development in my constituency—I will not say which one—being fully occupied, we suddenly found out that the sewerage system had not been installed to the required standard, which is causing issues, as you can imagine. It is not just about having the regulations but about ensuring that they are fully implemented.
Mr Drummond, you said:
“Firstly, Scotland needs to preserve and build upon its existing public sector building control system. Secondly, procurement must be very substantially improved to ensure higher quality in construction.”
How do we do that? Do we have the people with the skills to do that? Is that quality out there? What lead time did you have in mind for implementing that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Kenneth Gibson
In that case, I thank you for your evidence this morning, which is very helpful to the committee in its deliberations.
10:29 Meeting suspended.Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Kenneth Gibson
The final item on our agenda is to take evidence on the cost-effectiveness of Scottish public inquiries. I welcome to the meeting Patrick McGuire of Thompsons Solicitors Scotland. Good morning, Mr McGuire, and thank you for your written submission. I want to express how glad I am that you accepted the invitation to give evidence—it is greatly appreciated by the committee.
We will move straight to questions. I will start by quoting a question that was raised by Professor Cameron, who was one of the first people to give evidence on this matter. You may have seen what he said:
“It has to be recognised that inquiries are a source of substantial income for some large legal firms and as such the question arises as to the extent to which they are motivated to keep costs to a minimum and within budget.”
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Kenneth Gibson
You must have known that it was coming up—come on.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Kenneth Gibson
I understand—we just have a lot to get round. My question was very long, and I apologise for that, too.
Some witnesses have told us that a number of things can be done to make inquiries more efficient and effective, such as having a proper secretariat that has built up some institutional memory of how inquiries are successfully conducted, instead of having to reinvent the wheel, as we seem to do with every inquiry.
Tens of thousands of documents often have to be duplicated, but why does a trained lawyer have to do that? Can it be done by a paralegal or someone else? Would that reduce the cost? Apparently, it has a significant impact on the overall cost of any inquiry to have qualified lawyers copying 100,000 documents. All that I am saying is that, even with the system that we have and even if you accept that the system as it is should continue, there must be ways of reducing the costs to the public purse. After all, the cost of an inquiry might ultimately mean fewer officers on the street. It does have an impact.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Kenneth Gibson
Mr Henderson, do you also find that to be the case?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Kenneth Gibson
Thank you for that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Kenneth Gibson
I think that it would be the public bodies saying to the inquiry, within six to 12 weeks, “This is what we will do”. However, that does not preclude the inquiry taking evidence from people subsequently.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Kenneth Gibson
The issue of marking their own homework is important. The reason why the inquiry would still take place, even in those circumstances, is to ensure that the result was not, “Okay, everything is fine—we will just move on”.
The last point that I will make is about capacity. I mentioned earlier that there are 36 senior judges, and if three of them are involved in inquiries, that will have an impact on trials. What do you think is the maximum number of inquiries that can run in Scotland at any one time without derailing the day-to-day delivery of justice in Scotland through ordinary criminal trials?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Kenneth Gibson
But that is the dichotomy, is it not? That is why I was talking earlier about opportunity costs, and why a number of other organisations and, indeed, jurisdictions—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Sweden and Denmark, all of which we will be considering in the next two weeks—do this differently. They do not have the gold standard of a judge, because of the impact on their systems, but they are able to deliver these things in a different way.