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 3048 contributions
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
John Mason
Ms O’Brien, you said that you wanted to talk about profit, and now is your chance. Your submission says a few things. It says:
“organisations should not profiteer from children’s care”.
It also says:
“The ability for a Minister to put a profit limitation requirement on services could have catastrophic impact on our ability to deliver high quality ... care”.
Do you want to expand on that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
John Mason
Do you accept that we cannot do that in legislation? That comes down to the culture and the relationships that you were talking about earlier, but the committee is looking at legislation.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
John Mason
Do you see the fact that we are dealing with fostering agencies differently from residential care as a problem, or is that okay?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
John Mason
You wanted to come back in, Mr Dunlop.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
John Mason
I think that we are in danger of going over the same ground of discussing the culture as opposed to the legislation.
I want to come back to fostering. Ms Williams, you say in your submission that the average payment is £13,579 and that it varies by £34,696. It sounds as if, at the top end, it is quite a lot, but the average is—
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 17 September 2025
John Mason
The payments vary a lot and you would like there to be a standard rate.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
John Mason
You have covered some of the things that I was going to ask about with that line of questioning about aligning economic growth spending with skills gaps. Andy Witty has given the example of welders, which also came up when we visited the advanced manufacturing district. Are we clear where the skills gaps are and are young people clear about that? It is all very well for us—or for universities and colleges to know—but young people need to know in order to go for the right places for the jobs.
That takes me on to universities. Scottish Enterprise talked about graduates who are in non-graduate jobs, which says to me that we are sending too many young people to university—we should be sending some of them to train as welders instead of to do degrees. I will ask Andy Witty to respond.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
John Mason
Do the schools know where the gaps are?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
John Mason
Do you accept that some young people choose a university subject that they quite like the idea of, although they have no idea whether there will be a job at the end of it?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
John Mason
It might be unfair to ask you too much about that sector. We got the impression earlier that planning is resistant to modern techniques. Some planning departments like to keep houses looking like they have always looked. Have you picked up on that at all?