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 5973 contributions
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 May 2024
Edward Mountain
Hold on. There are two people trying to intervene, in case you did not hear them, minister.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 May 2024
Edward Mountain
I call Maurice Golden to speak to amendment 175—
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 May 2024
Edward Mountain
The result of the division is: For 2, Against 5, Abstentions 0.
Amendment 12 disagreed to.
Amendment 13 moved—[Maurice Golden].
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Meeting date: 14 May 2024
Edward Mountain
The question is, that amendment 14 be agreed to. Are we agreed?
Members: No.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 8 May 2024
Edward Mountain
Indeed it was, on 6 December 2011, but he was going to announce it and use the opportunity to stand on a bridge and make the announcement—which I applaud.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 8 May 2024
Edward Mountain
Highlanders do not understand where the commitment, having been made, went off the rails. You have said to the committee this morning that, when you left office, the project was still on track and everything was going well. You are implying that, up until 2016, when John Swinney was still in post, you believed that it was going well.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 8 May 2024
Edward Mountain
The project languished for six years—for nearly seven years, actually—and no one told anyone in the Highlands that the dualling would not be completed by 2025. Who was responsible for that languishing? Should Highlanders and the people of Scotland have been told that the dualling was not going to be achieved before two years before it should have been completed, if that makes sense?
10:30Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 8 May 2024
Edward Mountain
My point is that, between then and when you stopped being First Minister, you would have regularly requested updates from Alex Neil at Cabinet meetings as to how the project was going. Surely it was not something that you just left to him; it would have been discussed around the Cabinet table.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 8 May 2024
Edward Mountain
I report back to the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee, of which I am convener.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Meeting date: 8 May 2024
Edward Mountain
You mentioned the middle of June. It was actually on 6 June 2012 when Alex Neil announced that the Government’s aspiration was the completion of the dualling of the A9 by 2025. I am assuming that you had a Cabinet meeting on the Tuesday, so you would have known that he was going up on the Wednesday to make that big announcement.