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 864 contributions
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Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Alasdair Allan
It was just a provocative question—I am not really holding out that scenario, but it got the conversation going.
A connected question concerns grazing, which you mentioned. There is, in many communities, a crossover between the continuance of a grazed landscape and the continuance of many of the habitats that people are keen to protect. Crofting holds out at least the prospect of low-intensity agriculture that might benefit the environment. My question is about what you foresee the change in definition meaning in the future. Will it promote that relationship and the benefits of low-intensity agriculture?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Alasdair Allan
On a related point, the Law Society of Scotland has also raised concerns about section 10. Some of the questions have probably been answered, but I wonder whether Chris Kerr from Registers of Scotland could offer any perspective on section 10 and the issues raised by the Law Society.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Alasdair Allan
The whole issue of unattached grazing shares—or deemed crofts—is of interest to the committee. It might be helpful if somebody on the panel could take us through the history of how the two came to be divorced from each other, and then we can talk about what happens next.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Alasdair Allan
Would it be fair to say that, outside Shetland, many of these situations have happened by accident rather than by design? Is the bill designed to correct situations that have happened by accident rather than by design?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Alasdair Allan
To pick up on that point, my impression is that there is widespread welcome for the bill’s highlighting of environmental use.
Emma Harper referred to population retention. Some of this comes down to how not just an individual crofter but a community manages or justifies a decision. Hypothetical examples might include every crofter in a village deciding to plant trees, at which point nobody in the village would be actively using their land in the traditional sense and taking part in the common life—common grazings and so on. I am not suggesting that that will be an outcome of the bill, but how do you foresee the definition of environmental use being managed in a way that prevents such scenarios at a community level—at a common grazings level—as well as having individual crofters justify their decisions?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Alasdair Allan
Most people are doing their best. The problems that you describe are very real. However, on our visit and in other contexts, the committee has been asked the question that Brian Inkster was alluding to: what can be done to ensure that a village does not end up with multiple abandoned crofts owned by people who may not even live in the country? For understandable reasons—I completely appreciate them, as I live in a community like that myself—you do not want people to be put in a difficult, poisonous situation.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 8 October 2025
Alasdair Allan
I had hoped that the explanation would simplify matters, but I am not sure that it does.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 1 October 2025
Alasdair Allan
We have been speaking about data. Much of the fishing fleet is already embracing technologies such as remote electronic monitoring and catch monitoring. Would it be useful for the use of that technology to be mandatory in these sites and elsewhere?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 1 October 2025
Alasdair Allan
It is on this subject.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 1 October 2025
Alasdair Allan
It is the really the same issue as has been raised. You will probably have heard in the previous panel a discussion about the phrase “the best available science”. Obviously, the best available science is all anyone can and should act on, but is the Government constantly assessing where the gaps in the data are in order to try to proactively fill those? That was one of the questions that was being asked by the previous panel.
