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 3160 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Douglas Ross
The Courier is fairly sure that you sent a text message, which is why it ran the story this morning.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Douglas Ross
I think that I would remember how I ended my career at a university, and I would hope that it would be done in a proper way.
Do you know what I thought when I read that story this morning? Regardless of whether it was an email or a text message, when I read that story, the only thing that I thought about you was that you were a coward. You could not go back to the university to face the staff who were losing their jobs or face the students whose studies were so badly disrupted. You just created this mess and walked away into the sunset. Is that right?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Douglas Ross
What pay-off did you get for walking away from the mess that you created?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Douglas Ross
It is a very simple and straightforward question. Let us be clear: you got more than £150,000 to walk away from a university that you almost destroyed. Did you deserve £150,000 for doing that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Douglas Ross
Were you disappointed? Did you genuinely believe that, if the chair of court and others had not asked you to resign, you could have turned the situation around? Were you the right man to solve the problems that you had created?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Douglas Ross
You have not said one way or the other whether you think you deserved the £150,000-plus pay-off. Given everything that has gone on, everything that you have, I hope, read—even though you did not watch our evidence yesterday—and everything that you have heard from your former colleagues and from students who trusted you to lead their university, have you, at any point, considered paying that money back?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Douglas Ross
At any point, did you consider that, having created this mess, you did not deserve that money so would pay it back?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Douglas Ross
But you do not regret them enough to pay back £150,000.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Douglas Ross
How can that be the case when you were the accountable officer? Were people not telling you the truth? Were they withholding information from you? Were you not in the country or at the university enough to hear those concerns?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Douglas Ross
Hold on, Professor Gillespie. First of all, if you had watched yesterday’s evidence session, you would have been very clear that the finance director was totally out of his depth in this area. He did not feel that he had the required expertise to deal with the covenant. From listening to him yesterday, I accepted that he would not be passing on advice on the issue, because he was seeking advice himself. I am not sure how you can put all that on him.
You were the accountable officer. You were in charge. You were the principal. By the sound of things, you were not that worried about the situation. You travelled down to London and had an ad hoc conversation about it. There had been a major breach of the finances in your university. You held a very senior position at that time, not just in your university but for universities across Scotland. Are you telling us that you did not inform your own court—which is in charge of governance—about the issue?
