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 3369 contributions
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
Meeting date: 11 December 2025
Mark Ruskell
The future of Grangemouth has always been linked to Mossmorran, and for decades they have shared a common workforce. A few weeks ago, the Deputy First Minister came to the chamber and talked about expanding the Grangemouth investment task force to include Mossmorran as a potential location for projects. Can the cabinet secretary give members an update on that?
In addition, given that it seems that a number of projects have now been selected, is it too late—I hope not—to incorporate Mossmorran into the thinking around the work of that task force and could consideration be given to successful projects that can include both sites?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Mark Ruskell
I know that this might be a sensitive area, given history, but have there been any interministerial discussions about securing an exemption to the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020? That has been done successfully before, particularly with single-use vapes, and the provision under section 140 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 is available, if everybody is happy with that. Obviously, getting everybody happy in the UK is the challenge.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Mark Ruskell
Will the cabinet secretary give way?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Mark Ruskell
I am trying to understand that argument. You are, in effect, saying that we should have a national marine plan with no reference to fisheries in it. I do not quite understand that. Surely fisheries management is, by its very nature, spatial, and therefore a spatial interpretation of fisheries management and a relationship to a plan alongside other activities, including activities that use the seabed, such as renewables and fish farming, would be quite a rational approach. I appreciate the distinction between onshore and offshore, but surely a marine plan needs to include marine activities, among which fisheries are an important spatial form of management.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Mark Ruskell
In the words of Douglas Lumsden, it has been a monster mega stage 2—[Laughter.]—so I will keep my comments short.
I am seeking to amend the title of the bill to reflect the urgency of the nature crisis and the collective will of the Parliament to act to address it. Amendment 33 would rename the bill to the “Nature Emergency (Scotland) Bill”. I draw the committee’s attention to the fact that the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee scrutinised the Scottish biodiversity strategy and made the recommendation to the Government—I do not know whether the recommendation was picked up—that the strategy should be renamed “Scotland’s Nature Emergency Strategy” to underline the seriousness of the issue, and the intent for what the strategy should be achieving and the action that it should be driving.
The vision and purpose of the bill is important. As we have explored in earlier debates about part 2, the focus must be on moving forward on restoring nature. We are in a nature emergency, and we should reflect that in the title of the bill.
I move amendment 33.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Mark Ruskell
I ask Sarah Boyack to reflect on the fact that, in the previous session of Parliament, a proposed fisheries management bill was in the programme for government but it was never delivered. We have been waiting a very long time to unpack the issues, and trying to unpack an entire reform of fisheries management in 45 minutes or an hour is very challenging work for everybody.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Mark Ruskell
I will not press amendment 33, and I will reflect on the cabinet secretary’s comments. As we move to the debates at stage 3, it would be good to hear “nature emergency” reflected in the Government’s intent.
Amendment 33, by agreement, withdrawn.
Section 38 agreed to.
Long title agreed to.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Mark Ruskell
Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Mark Ruskell
Northern Ireland is one of the four nations. It has clearly set the tone.
I will not press amendment 32 today, but I think that consideration needs to be given to how an appropriate consensus position could be reached ahead of stage 3.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Mark Ruskell
I will press amendment 76. The Scottish Wildlife Trust has been doing a huge amount of work over many years on nature networks. Its concern, and the concern of many stakeholders, is that, although nature networks are referred to in the Scottish biodiversity strategy and are part of the workstream, they are not central to it. There would be benefit in drawing out the work that is being done to support nature networks across Scotland by having specific reporting on that.
I do not see nature networks as being in competition with other land uses; I see them as being integral to all land uses, because every type of land use will have corridors through which nature can pass. Land that is used for agriculture has hedgerows and other networks within it. The same is true of the urban landscape. Our parks and cycle lanes all form part of nature networks, so it is not something that can be considered to one side—it should be integral to all land uses.
In some parts of Government, to an extent, I think that there is perhaps a little bit of a misunderstanding about the central importance of nature networks and the need to integrate them into all forms of land use.
For those reasons, I will press amendment 76. I accept the cabinet secretary’s point that nature networks are being considered, but I do not think that they are a central consideration, as needs to be the case.