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 2881 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
John Mason
Okay. Dr Ireton, I will ask you the same question: is the inquiry process too legal?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
John Mason
That was helpful from both of you. I know that none of you is particularly enthusiastic about the plans anyway, but at what level do they become not worth while? It seems to me that there will be a lot of change and, hopefully, in the long run there will be improvements in the whole system. In the short run, however, there is just a big cost for no great benefit in year one or two. If the one-off cost was £30 million, as has been suggested, is that prohibitive? Based on the cost itself, is it worth going ahead?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
John Mason
That is helpful because that was my next question. I am interested in others’ views as well. Although the number of people involved is quite large, the money going into apprenticeships is much smaller. Is there a danger that, in the future SFC, apprenticeships will be sidelined?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
John Mason
Some people will definitely transfer, because 100 per cent of their job is in that area. Some people definitely will not transfer. Presumably, there is a grey area in the middle.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
John Mason
Mr Campbell, you seemed to say to Bill Kidd that there was a bit of a danger in splitting up SDS. Is part of the answer to completely merge SDS and the SFC and so save on a public body? Some of us would quite like to see a simplified landscape.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
John Mason
Do non-university training providers ever go bust?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
John Mason
If a provider was struggling, would SDS pick that up?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
John Mason
Presumably, if those are the TUPE rules, the Scottish Government would not have the power to cap those costs, would it?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
John Mason
What would you expect to know at this stage? I know that this kind of thing does not happen every day.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 21 May 2025
John Mason
So, the structure does not matter very much?