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.
Criathragan Hide all filters
Displaying 3377 contributions
|
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Gillian Martin
Phil Raines has just reminded me of a third sector that I had forgotten about: industrial decarbonisation.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Gillian Martin
The details will be in the climate change plan. I do not have the details with me—we have not published the draft plan yet; we are bottoming it out.
Scotland is already exceeding a lot of its targets for tree planting anyway: the latest figure is that Scotland produces about 70 per cent of the tree planting for the whole of the UK. We are already punching well above our weight in that respect, although we still need to do more. However, it needs to be the right planting in the right places, working with partners who see the benefit of that planting.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Gillian Martin
No. I am not going to talk about taxation in a climate change plan. We will set out the costs that are associated with the climate change plan and put them in the context of the market creation that is involved and the costs and benefits that are associated with that market creation.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Gillian Martin
That is very much on my mind. I come back to what I was saying about the question of heating buildings: we have to make sure that it is affordable and that people feel the benefit from it.
I will come on to the nuts and bolts of how we make it affordable. Yearly budget decisions will be made, but we will set out our costings in the climate change plan, too. We will also point to the fact that it is, rightly, not going to be only a Government spend. There must be Government and private contributions to it.
I also point to the cost of not doing it. There is a cost associated with not doing it in terms of the impact that that will have on the resilience of communities. There is also another cost, which points to some of the innovation-related things that I have been talking about. If Scotland is a hothouse for innovative ideas to get us to net zero by 2045, our economy will be boosted as a result of that activity. I mentioned Copenhagen: people there had the idea that they wanted to decarbonise Copenhagen. Out of that came many industries and businesses that are now world leading. That is where I see Scotland in relation to floating offshore wind and carbon capture and storage. There will be a long-term economic benefit associated with the actions to reduce our emissions. I am absolutely confident that there is a massive economic return.
We need to make sure that the short-term costs are fair. The Government has to step in where it can. We must also recognise that the Government cannot foot the bill for the entire transformation and that there are business opportunities associated with driving down emissions in all sectors. Those need to be quantified as well, and I will be able to set them out in the climate change plan.
Today’s meeting is about the carbon budgets rather than about the detail of the plan, which will be put to the Parliament in October.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Gillian Martin
It will have an estimate—
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Gillian Martin
Yes.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Gillian Martin
Do you mean the emissions impact of the legislation or of the budgeting?
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Gillian Martin
I am not going to go into all the substantive points. People have made their views clear. I do not think that it is lazy to suggest that there is a cost, a danger and a great deal of risk associated with doing nothing.
I align myself with the comments that the deputy convener made about the Parliament’s responsibility. I feel that we fell down in our responsibility in the previous session by not doing what we could to support even the most minor policy directions that were put to the Parliament. It is not enough to support a target. There has to be concerted action. If we do not do it in this generation, the next generation will ask, rightly, why it was put in such a precarious position.
I have moved the motion in my name, but I will leave my comments until such time as I have a full plan in front of me and I am able to answer all the detailed questions that have been asked today.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Gillian Martin
That is very much on my mind. I come back to what I was saying about the question of heating buildings: we have to make sure that it is affordable and that people feel the benefit from it.
I will come on to the nuts and bolts of how we make it affordable. Yearly budget decisions will be made, but we will set out our costings in the climate change plan, too. We will also point to the fact that it is, rightly, not going to be only a Government spend. There must be Government and private contributions to it.
I also point to the cost of not doing it. There is a cost associated with not doing it in terms of the impact that that will have on the resilience of communities. There is also another cost, which points to some of the innovation-related things that I have been talking about. If Scotland is a hothouse for innovative ideas to get us to net zero by 2045, our economy will be boosted as a result of that activity. I mentioned Copenhagen: people there had the idea that they wanted to decarbonise Copenhagen. Out of that came many industries and businesses that are now world leading. That is where I see Scotland in relation to floating offshore wind and carbon capture and storage. There will be a long-term economic benefit associated with the actions to reduce our emissions. I am absolutely confident that there is a massive economic return.
We need to make sure that the short-term costs are fair. The Government has to step in where it can. We must also recognise that the Government cannot foot the bill for the entire transformation and that there are business opportunities associated with driving down emissions in all sectors. Those need to be quantified as well, and I will be able to set them out in the climate change plan.
Today’s meeting is about the carbon budgets rather than about the detail of the plan, which will be put to the Parliament in October.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Grangemouth’s Industrial Future
Meeting date: 11 June 2025
Gillian Martin
I have had many conversations with UK Government ministers on that. It is no secret to say that I was very disappointed that Grangemouth was not factored in when those initial announcements were made and Teeside was allocated £50 million. Given that project willow had probably just published its report, in which SAF was one of the nine options, it would be an understatement to say that I was surprised about that. I am not telling you anything that Ed Miliband and Michael Shanks do not know. They know how disappointed I was about that.
There is an opportunity for some of that funding to be leveraged into Grangemouth. The refinery is an ideal place for SAF production. Indeed, the Scottish Government funded some studies to allow Petroineos to bottom out its capability to produce SAF in Scotland. One of the reasons why that was not progressed is that, at the time, the previous UK Government was against removing the HEFA cap. That put a limit on Petroineos’s ambitions in that area.
Petroineos was quite up front—this was mentioned at the Grangemouth future industry board, when ministers from the previous UK Government were involved—that the HEFA cap was a real barrier to it progressing anything on sustainable aviation fuel or any biorefining projects, in relation to which the Scottish Government had given it funding to carry out studies. That was a missed opportunity.
What you have asked about, Mr MacDonald, is exactly what I have been putting to the UK Government. I hope that I am being listened to.
