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 1352 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Liz Smith
I have a question about a comment that the cabinet secretary made in her evidence last week at the committee in relation to the free school meals policy. I know that you cannot comment on that specific policy, but she said:
“We will not be able to roll out the universal offer as far as we had perhaps initially wanted to”
because
“we have to prioritise those children who are most in need.”—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 2 September 2025; c 34.]
Without going into the details about free school meals, do you think that it would be helpful to have a debate about the effectiveness of universalism? To go back to my original questions, that would measure where the policy intention is having the most effect, as the cabinet secretary was implying, and perhaps less effect when it is being given to people who do not require that universal benefit. Would that be helpful?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Government and Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Liz Smith
It also means that there is a bit of a vacuum now. People are trying to do the right thing but they do not know whether what they do will be accurate, because they do not have the necessary data.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Government and Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Liz Smith
Is there any optimism about how we will get that data? This is a crucial problem in policy making, particularly with regard to longer-term sustainability, because we will not achieve that unless we are able to increase the revenues that come into the economy. Not knowing where that revenue might come from is a pretty serious problem. Do we have any optimistic outlooks?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Government and Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Liz Smith
If I may, I will focus on the revenue side of the budget. Professor Roy, you said earlier that most of the data that you require to estimate revenues is RTI data that comes from HMRC, but when we are looking for fiscal sustainability in the long term, we need more data than that, particularly data on the labour market. You said that you have concerns about the fact that a lot of data on the labour market is missing. Could you tell us a bit more about those concerns? Trends such as the number of people in work, as opposed to the number of those who are out of work, whether through unemployment or inactivity, really matter for the future. The projections for ensuring fiscal sustainability are very dependent on our having that data, some of which we do not appear to have. Could you say a bit more about that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Government and Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Liz Smith
Can I dig a bit deeper into why the data is not there? Obviously, having it is critical for longer-term planning.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Government and Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Liz Smith
Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Government and Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Liz Smith
That is where the whole issue of universality comes in. We should be talking about these issues. I have done so many times. Can I finish my point? I am conscious of the time.
When it comes to incentives to ensure that more people are going back into the workforce so that we can raise tax revenue—we are obviously becoming more economically productive—is the Government not concerned that, as a result of our welfare system, which is less penetrating in terms of the questions that are asked of people and which does not use the face-to-face inquiries that are used down south, we are encouraging more people to stay on benefits instead of going back into work?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Government and Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Liz Smith
Thank you for your detailed answer. The key point is that the economic forecasters, not least the Scottish Fiscal Commission, are warning strongly about the difficulties with the fiscal sustainability of the social security budget because it is increasing at a faster rate than in other parts of the United Kingdom. The question is whether the evidence that the Scottish Government has about the effectiveness of its policy making is enough to ensure that its policies are the right policies.
There is evidence to suggest that the Scottish child payment is effective enough, but, when it comes to the adult disability payment and some of the other disability payments, there seems to be a lack of evidence. It is all very well to talk about having a more beneficent system that is based on fairness and so on—we all signed up to that. However, we also signed up to a welfare system that delivers to those who are most in need. At the moment, we seem to be increasing social security benefits at quite a rate, and there are questions about whether all of that money is going to those who are most in need and whether the policy is having the unintended consequence of preventing some people from going back into the labour market. That concerns us all, I think, from a fiscal sustainability angle, and I would be interested to learn what work the Scottish Government is doing to address that very serious concern.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Government and Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Liz Smith
Does that mean that, within the vague trends that we have, it is very difficult to predict whether policies that try to reduce the amount of economic inactivity will be able to get that right? Is that one of the major problems?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Scottish Government and Scottish Fiscal Commission (Publications)
Meeting date: 2 September 2025
Liz Smith
I will concentrate on the sustainability of the social security budget. At the start of the meeting, the convener flagged up the cabinet secretary’s statistics, which say that the social security payment budget is going up from £6.8 billion in 2025-26 to £8.8 billion in 2029-30. That is almost a 30 per cent increase in four years. Given that you say that the Scottish child payment is effective delivery of social security payments, what work is the Scottish Government doing on the effectiveness of other aspects of the social security budget? I am asking particularly about adult disability payments, which are ballooning out of control.
