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 2601 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
Maybe I am not putting it very clearly. It seems to me that there is a tension between longer-term planning and commitments on the one hand, which, in a sense, tie the Government’s hands, and on the other, doing short-term things that do not tie our hands, which is a more flexible approach, but is less helpful to the third sector and local government.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
I turn to public sector reform. In paragraph 105 you say that public sector reform requires “significant investment”. There is the example of Registers of Scotland, which will be coming up, among others, in the next evidence session. Registers of Scotland seems to have managed to reform, digitise, do a lot of that kind of stuff and save on 10 per cent of its jobs—all without extra investment. It has just done that as part of its routine working. Is that possible on a bigger scale?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
I did not ask any questions about the instrument, because I really think that the measure is self-evidently a good thing. It will, I hope, raise revenue and help first-time buyers. It just seems absolutely the right thing to do.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
As I understand it, someone in Ayrshire who may need a particular procedure that cannot be done locally would go to Glasgow. In a sense, that system is working at the moment, so there may not be a lot of space for reform. You have mentioned AI. I understood from your submission and other papers that there is a bit of a barrier to some things because different health boards are doing things differently.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
I realise that every organisation is different, and maybe Chris Kerr can explain how Registers of Scotland can manage that cut without needing any extra input. By contrast, Food Standards Scotland says in its submission that it just wants more money and more people. Could we just cut funding by 10 per cent for everybody? Would that work, Chris?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
What would that mean? What is it that the Government does not understand? It has flexed the budget successfully during the year in the past two years. One scenario would be that, if it was you and me personally, we would try to save money so that, if we have a bad year, we would have some savings. However, the Government effectively cannot do that, because we have a limit on how much we can save, and because there is huge political pressure against saving money, when all the parties want us to spend every single penny. I am struggling to understand what the Government is missing, what it is not doing that it should be doing.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 7 January 2025
John Mason
I do not want to keep pursuing this for ever. When the Government sets out the budget, should it also say how, if we were to get an extra billion pounds during the year from Westminster or for some other reason, we would spend that extra billion pounds or, if funds from Westminster or our tax revenues were to fall by a billion pounds, how we would save a billion pounds? Do you want it to be so specific that, at the beginning of the year, we say, “This is the budget that we’re hoping for, but this is what we would do if we didn’t manage it”?
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.
