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: 22 April 2025
John Mason
You are on “Good Morning Scotland” a few times a week.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
John Mason
I might come back to you on that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
John Mason
Professor Bell, do you want to come in again?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
John Mason
Would health also be partly demand led?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
John Mason
Both of you gave helpful answers. You deal with different audiences—you have specialised people who know everything from back to front and you have the public, while MSPs and MPs are probably somewhere in the middle. The SFC has also been grappling with that and is trying to communicate more with the wider public.
The convener asked you about the word “transparency”. In one sense, the more data you produce, the more transparent the position might become for the experts, but is there a danger that that would make it less transparent and more complex for the ordinary person on the street?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
John Mason
You mentioned making a central forecast and that you are also trying to point out the risks and the variations that there could be. With tariffs, we really do not know what will happen. Things might get worse or they might get better. Also, there might be a trade deal. Do you think that that is well understood? Presumably, experts who read your reports get that, but does the wider population understand that, when you are making a forecast, that forecast is in the middle of a range of possibilities?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
John Mason
They need to or they should?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
John Mason
I will pursue the work that other committees are doing that has a financial impact but does not come under the heading “budget”.
Along with Ross Greer, I am on the Education, Children and Young People Committee, at which—as, I am sure, you are aware—the University of Dundee has come up. We are looking at Dundee’s finances, although those do not come under a budget heading, and we will probably look at the finances of the university sector as a whole. Is such committee work not quite useful? It feeds into the wider public’s thinking, and the Government then ends up saying, “Oh, we’d better do a bit more for universities.” Would you say that some of the work, therefore, is more indirect? Professor Bell, I see that you want to come in.
11:45Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
John Mason
If I picked you up correctly, Professor Bell, I think that you were a bit critical of the setting of the 2024-25 budget, saying that it could have taken a longer-term view and been a bit more robust, especially because of the public sector pay issue that overtook events. I am interested in what the Government could or should have done instead of what it did. For example, should it have been a bit more up front and said, “Well, we probably will have to have a 5 per cent pay increase”? However, would the unions then just have wanted 6 or 7 per cent, with it becoming a bidding war? Alternatively, should the Government have kept money back? Should it have kept 5 per cent of the budget in a pot, unallocated, potentially meaning cuts elsewhere, so that, if things went wrong, that money could smooth things out? How would that have worked?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 22 April 2025
John Mason
I largely agree with your comments. As Michelle Thomson and I have previously discussed, when we, as members of this committee, sit on another committee, such as the Education, Children and Young People Committee, we have a responsibility to raise the financial issues, because, frankly, a lot of our colleagues do not.
Following on from that, I have asked both the Scottish Fiscal Commission and the OBR about how they communicate with the public and experts. They both think that they are making progress and that the public—which probably includes MSPs—now understand the finances better. Do you think that they are making progress on that?
