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 775 contributions
|
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Care Reform (Scotland) Bill: Financial Summary
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
Maree Todd
I do not think that we have that figure.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Care Reform (Scotland) Bill: Financial Summary
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
Maree Todd
I am confident because, for a number of years, I have worked closely with all of the stakeholders involved. I am confident about where we are and what we are planning to do, and I am confident that we will find an impactful way forward. We all agree that the status quo is not acceptable and that change is needed, and we see the bill as containing the elements of change that are largely universally agreed upon.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Care Reform (Scotland) Bill: Financial Summary
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
Maree Todd
It did not happen with the first iteration—that is correct. It did not happen with the second iteration. The core elements of this third iteration are the issues that everybody is agreed on and the changes that everybody wants to see.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Care Reform (Scotland) Bill: Financial Summary
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
Maree Todd
As I said, and as you have stated yourself, the changes that have occurred relate largely to differences in approach. The most substantial change in the figures is because the approach in the bill has changed. We are settled now, in the main, on what will be delivered by the bill, and the range of potential costs and our confidence in those costs have improved greatly because of that. There is a settled position, and I think that the public would like us to get on with delivering it.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Care Reform (Scotland) Bill: Financial Summary
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
Maree Todd
Lee, would you like to answer that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Care Reform (Scotland) Bill: Financial Summary
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
Maree Todd
Would you like to respond to that, Lee?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Care Reform (Scotland) Bill: Financial Summary
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
Maree Todd
I agree. The changes in the financial memorandum over the years largely reflect the changes to the bill. The bill has been refined and we have, as the committee will be aware, substantially changed course a number of times, and each time we have provided the committee with fresh estimates of what the bill will cost to deliver, according to what is intended by it.
We are getting very close to delivery point. There are still some unknowns about what refinements might occur at stage 3, but we have greatly narrowed the range and are pretty confident about the direction of travel.
The reason that the numbers were different in the letter that I sent last week—and the reason for the correction that I have sent today—was simply human error. A box in a table was completed and, as a result, the phasing started one year earlier than it should have, which knocked the whole table out of sync. The error was quickly spotted and corrected.
The reason for the range in the figures is that we are projecting 10 years in the future and the ranges get broader the further they are from the moment in time at which we start. Therefore, we are taking into account the projected increase in the number of carers and things like that, but we cannot know specifically how many carers will use the service in 10 years.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Care Reform (Scotland) Bill: Financial Summary
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
Maree Todd
As I have previously explained during various committee appearances and in the chamber, a great deal of Anne’s law has already been delivered by secondary legislation—indeed, many of the changes that we need to see have already happened on the ground. The Care Inspectorate is a passionate advocate for Anne’s law now, so I think that the cost that will be associated with the final iteration’s introduction will be insubstantial, because much of the cost has accrued already in the course of normal work.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Care Reform (Scotland) Bill: Financial Summary
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
Maree Todd
No, thank you. I am very grateful for the committee’s time and its on-going scrutiny of the bill. I think that the changes that the bill proposes are ones that everyone in Scotland is now agreed upon, and I am keen to crack on and deliver.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Care Reform (Scotland) Bill: Financial Summary
Meeting date: 27 May 2025
Maree Todd
As I said, the national care service team does not work entirely on bill delivery—bill delivery is a great deal of what they do, but the ambition behind the national care service initiative, which is to reduce variation in the level and quality of care, is greater than the bill. The bill team delivers a large amount of work in that regard outside the work on the bill itself.
To put those costs into context, that £30 million over three years relates to work on understanding a system that costs £6.1 billion a year. That means that less than 0.2 per cent of the cost of the system is being spent on understanding how it works, on consultation and on the creation of ways of achieving improvements in the system.
Over the past few months, I have raised many concerns in the chamber about some of the changes that have hit us in social care in Scotland, such as the increase in employer national insurance contributions, which has had a devastating impact and will undoubtedly lead to some care providers going under, and the changes to immigration arrangements. I wish that all Governments spent time understanding the sector before making substantial changes.
