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 2594 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
John Mason
Can you spell out the difference that it could have made if we had had better and more frequent medium-term financial strategies in the past few years? You mentioned capital projects and workforce planning. Where might it have made a difference to those things, as well as to other aspects in the future? There are many capital projects—we want to build more houses and dual the A9—but we will not know what the capital budget is, so can we plan ahead?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
John Mason
Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
John Mason
Okay. On a slightly different subject, you are a bit sceptical about the committees doing year-round work if they do not have enough information from the Government to do it. Can you expand on that? I am keen on the idea that the committees do work throughout the year in relation to the budget. For example, the Education, Children and Young People Committee has been looking at the situation at Dundee university, which has become quite a challenge. I see that as part of that committee’s budget work—it is not coming from the Government, it is coming from the circumstances and the situation around funding for universities. Do you not think that it is possible for the committees to do a lot of their budget work regardless of whether they get information from the Government?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
John Mason
Michelle Thomson mentioned debt. That seems to be a difference between the UK’s sustainability—or lack of it—and Scotland’s, because debt is not an issue for us; we have only to cut our spending.
The stark figures show that, at the moment, the UK’s public debt is 98 per cent of GDP and that it will potentially go up to 274 per cent. Is there a psychological level at which the UK Government will have to do something? I would have thought that 100 per cent of GDP would have quite a psychological impact and that getting to 100 per cent is quite a big deal. Can you forecast—or does the OBR forecast—that when we get to, say, 150 per cent, the UK will suddenly change direction? Is it a gradual thing?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
John Mason
I want to touch on one final area. I do not see much in the report about preventative spend. In one sense, all health spending is preventative, because spending on health improves people’s health, which prevents illness. However, is there an issue with how we spend the health money? If we put more into general practice and primary care and cut the money going to hospitals a bit, would that have a benefit in the long run? Have you considered that sort of issue?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
John Mason
Would I be right in saying that, despite financial incentives, no country has succeeded in increasing the birth rate?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
John Mason
As has been raised—and we will probably raise it in our next session as well—if you lay out a number of scenarios A, B, C and D, the media will go for the absolute worst of them. If we said that, if teachers get a pay increase, class sizes will have to increase to compensate, that would immediately become the headline. Politically, is it realistic to lay out options, some of which would be pretty unpalatable?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
John Mason
You are talking about things like alcohol, tobacco and all of that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
John Mason
Being a little bit pessimistic, as I think that some of my colleagues are, too, today, it seems to me that, however well we do, however much we spend and however healthy the population becomes, the demand for health services will just grow and grow and grow. We will never be able to meet the demand; there will never be a time when supply equals demand. You can absolutely disagree with me. We have already mentioned mental health and obesity, which, when I was younger, were not talked about as much or were not there. Something else will turn up. If we sort obesity and mental health, it will be something else tomorrow, will it not?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Fiscal Sustainability Report)
Meeting date: 29 April 2025
John Mason
In chapter 4 of the report, in the section on the determinants of health spending, you refer to demographics and other cost pressures. I was particularly interested in what you refer to as “the income effect”, which seems to say that, as people get wealthier, their expectations increase and therefore their demand for healthcare increases. You can tell me whether that is a correct summary. Earlier, we heard the idea, which would seem obvious, that, if people’s health improves, we will not need to spend so much on the health service. However, this seems to say the opposite—in other words, that, as people get better off, their health might improve in some ways, but, in other ways, we need to spend more money.
