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 1257 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Liz Smith
Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Liz Smith
I have a question about fair funding. On Friday, I visited a voluntary group in my area, which argued strongly that, when it comes to getting funding, it is easier to get funding for specific projects than it is to get core funding to support the operation as a whole, which threatens the group’s sustainability and its long-term future. Is that something that the voluntary sector is concerned about across the board?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Liz Smith
Should there be more focus on zero-based budgeting when it comes to addressing what you have just said about the economic impact of specific spends and how they articulate with the Government’s priorities, as you mentioned earlier, not least in terms of the effectiveness of those spends but also the opportunity costs, which you said were very difficult to measure?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Liz Smith
That said, there are aspects of universal provision where money could be saved. To go back to free school meals, this was not part of the cabinet secretary’s evidence, but local authorities will tell you that, because of the number of free school meals that are not actually being used by those who are entitled, there is quite a lot of waste in the system. I would cite that personally as an example of where money could be saved.
The real point is whether the focus on universalism, which might in theory sound helpful, creates problems for the long-term fiscal sustainability of the country. We are surely in a very difficult period for that sustainability. I am just asking whether you think that some aspects of universalism must be reviewed.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Liz Smith
Do you share that view, Mr Robinson?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
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 [Draft]
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 [Draft]
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 [Draft]
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 [Draft]
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.