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 3369 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 January 2025
John Mason
It is a slight delay of a month and a half so far. Will there not have to come a time when you say, “This is the budget for A, B, C and D”? It might not be you who does that—it will be Shona Robison.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 January 2025
John Mason
Okay. I will not pursue that further just now.
We have talked about colleges quite a lot, but I do not think that we have mentioned support staff. There was quite a dispute over the lecturers, which I think has been resolved, which is great. However, it has been suggested that support staff will also need a pay settlement. Can you say anything on that? Is there enough in the budget for it?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 January 2025
John Mason
That was the case with the lecturers, but the Government put in some extra money—it was £4.5 million, I think—to resolve that. Would the Government do the same for the support staff?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 January 2025
John Mason
Colleges are also in the public sector now, as has been mentioned. Does that mean that there will be no compulsory redundancies at colleges?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 January 2025
John Mason
We have talked quite a lot about college and university funding. One of the colleges’ arguments is that they get so much less per student than universities do. Of course, it will vary within courses, as some courses will be more expensive than others. I am not asking for more money for colleges and universities but, as a general point, is the way in which we are sharing the money out fair, and is it the best way?
One aspect of that is the difference between colleges and universities, but I wonder, too, whether universities should not be means tested in some way. The University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh are sitting on huge reserves. Although the University of Dundee has problems, the last accounts for it that I looked at show £160 million of unrestricted reserves, which is huge compared with, say, Glasgow Caledonian University or some of the colleges in Glasgow. I wonder whether we have the balance right as to who we are supporting.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 8 January 2025
John Mason
I have one final area that I want to touch on. The Finance and Public Administration Committee has been focusing on public sector reform, and I think that Ivan McKee is leading on that.
Do you have any thoughts about public sector reform in the education sector? Given that we cannot change the pupil to teacher ratio and so on, is reform more difficult in the education sector? Is there scope to bring in artificial intelligence or that kind of thing, so that one teacher can help more kids?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
Although we might improve outcomes a bit, does public service reform basically mean cutting jobs?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
Paragraph 14 of your report says that
“the Scottish Government risks overspending against its budget”
but, legally, the Scottish Government cannot overspend against its budget or, at least, against its income. What do you mean by that? The reality is that, by hook or by crook, the Government has to balance its budget.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
Do you accept that that is quite difficult for the Government? Even if it does emergency planning a year ahead, there is still a limited number of spaces where it can save money.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
One of the themes of your report, which comes up quite a lot, is that the Government is reacting to events and does not have a longer-term plan. However, is there not a certain inevitability of that happening in Scotland? For example, the UK Government came in and suddenly introduced a pay increase that was higher than we had previously expected as well as a national insurance increase. Those are events that most of us had not anticipated. What is the Government to do? Surely it simply has to react in the short term.
