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 1454 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
Yes, there was an increase of £246.8 million. That includes the annually managed expenditure provision for future national health service and teacher pension costs, which is obviously not available for day-to-day spending. At £141.9 million, AME is the biggest part of that figure. Under Transport Scotland, there is an extra £78.7 million for Scottish Rail Holdings, a non-departmental public body, for the lease costs of existing rolling stock—again, that has no impact on Scottish Government discretionary spending. There is a transfer of £24.1 million within the student loans budget line, which reflects updated estimates for student loan capital and capitalised interest requirements. That is another technical issue that does not have any impact on Scottish Government day-to-day spending.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
I will defer to officials on the technical aspects of that. Pensions are usually a complicated subject. They are affected by a range of factors.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
Indeed. Thank you for mentioning that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
We are very clear on this. The way in which we traditionally do budgeting—we have been doing this stuff for a long time in the public sector—does not necessarily lend itself to an environment in which there is money moving between silos and to prevention and so on. I recognise that and I am happy to work with the committee on how we address it. Indeed, workstreams 5 and 6 are all about preventative budgeting and how we configure budgets.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
It will come in in March. A small part of it will fall into this year’s budget.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
It is the on-going costs of the SQA. You are right—
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
If you look back at historical SQA budgets, you will see the reality of what its spend has been. That needs to be reflected in the budget going forward.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
The genesis of the Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill follows on from Grenfell and the requirement to find the funds to support retrofitting at-risk buildings. The intention of the building safety levy is, from memory, to raise about £30 million a year for Scottish Government funds over a 15-year period. The total fund required to retrofit is significantly in excess of that, so the levy covers only a small part of it. The rest will come out of general Government spending, which impacts other services. The levy is a mirror of the policy that has been taken forward in the rest of the UK by the UK Labour Government.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
I think that there is an appetite, which is evidenced by the fact that almost £300 million was spent to support that investment. It will be dependent on everybody’s circumstances, which will be different, but the ability to save on energy bills makes a significant difference. The cost of energy is very relevant; individuals will find themselves in a place where that investment could make a huge difference over time to their energy bills and to the quality of their housing and their lives—not to mention the net zero impact. It is an important investment and clearly there is still an appetite for it.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
That goes back to the point that I made earlier about looking through that lens. Last year, for the first time, we identified what the corporate costs were across the public sector. That pulled out a number of approximately £5 billion, which has driven the target of £1 billion of savings that we are identifying. The issue is that it is spread across every portfolio in every public body and across Government. Corralling that into one place so that you can see it in a separate virtual pot is an important piece of the mechanics, but it adds another layer of complexity to how you look at those budget lines.
10:00The answer to your question is that, throughout the accounts, the budgeting process is developing to set those corporate cost-reduction targets as part of portfolio budgets. For every portfolio, you will see what has been done previously, what the new budget looks like and, on your corporate costs, whether it is projected that there will be savings. That will be different for every portfolio, depending on the profile, but now that we have the information, we are able to do that.
