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 1967 contributions
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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Jamie Greene
I appreciate that time is ticking on, so I will try to make my last two questions brief. Workforce is an important issue that is covered in the report. Exhibit 8 provides us with a nice visual way of understanding the scale of the problem that we have at the moment. To pick a few examples, 13 per cent of social workers who were asked were very likely to leave their jobs in the next 12 months—I presume that that is a fairly high figure—half of foster carers have considered resigning, half experience burnout and poor wellbeing and some 40 per cent of children and young people social care staff do not feel safe at work. Those startling statistics paint a worrying picture of the workforce required to deliver the Promise, do they not?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Jamie Greene
My final question is simply this. We are now five years on from the Promise being made. There is clearly an ambition and a lot of good will in the room among stakeholders to meet the Promise, but in your professional judgment are we on track to do so by 2030? I am happy to go along the panel to hear answers.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Jamie Greene
When will the rest of it be administered?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Jamie Greene
Where did the figure of £0.5 billion get plucked from? Who said, “That is how much we need to deliver the Promise”? It sounds like an arbitrary number. Having read the Audit Scotland report, it also sounds to me as if the Government has no idea whether that money is being effective in delivering what it has to deliver. It is virtually impossible to follow the money, so before you spend another £250 million, how confident can you be that the money will be well spent?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Jamie Greene
Good morning. I want to get some clarity on the letter from your organisation that we were given sight of. Before I do so, I should caveat this by saying that there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with an Auditor General report. If Audit Scotland has said something, and you disagree with it, that is fine, but be honest about that. Unfortunately, in the opening statements, we heard phrases such as “we welcome the report and the recommendations” and “we accept the report and the recommendations”, but that is not what it says on this bit of paper.
Rather than taking a view on it, we are trying to get to the bottom of whether The Promise Scotland does or does not accept the report. You cannot come to committee and say, “We do accept it”, but then, on paper, say that you do not. The letter has your organisation’s letterhead on it and, on the back, it says “Chair—The Promise Scotland”, so we have to take at face value that this is the view of The Promise Scotland, and not simply that of an individual within the organisation. Which is it?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Jamie Greene
There is an inference in what you have said and what is in this letter that, somehow, this Audit Scotland report is slowing things down or making things worse. I do not know how different the clearance report was to the final report, but the letter explicitly says that the clearance report
“will not accelerate pace of change, instead risks slowing the current one.”
In fact, it says that the clearance draft “misses” opportunities
“to drive pace and progress”.
I apologise if I am misunderstanding, but it is not the job of Audit Scotland to drive pace and progress. It is the job of Audit Scotland to comment on pace and progress.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Jamie Greene
Yes, but that is not what the letter says. It says:
“In short, at worst, the report could derail Scotland’s progress towards keeping the promise.”
That is not welcoming the report or accepting its recommendations, is it?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Jamie Greene
I am glad that you mentioned that. I received your manifesto asks the other day. It is interesting. You say that it is difficult to quantify how short councils are in terms of their ability to deliver the Promise, but we have specific asks from COSLA, and it is not a small amount of cash that is being sought—it is a £16 billion inflationary uplift to, I presume, the block grant funding. There is £750 million for social care, which COSLA claims would increase the social worker workforce by more than 19,000—I will come on to the workforce in a moment; £844 million for the capital grant; and another nearly £1 billion for affordable housing supply, which may address some of the housing issues.
Mr Rennick, I imagine that you do not have £16 billion sloshing around your coffers at the moment. However, do you see the point? If local councils are not properly funded, there is no way on earth that we will deliver the Promise by 2030.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Jamie Greene
Let us talk about the whole family wellbeing fund. How much of the £0.5 billion that was promised has been spent?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 10 December 2025
Jamie Greene
I would have preferred that you came in and said, “Look, there is stuff in this report we do not like, so I cannot sign up to the report and its recommendations.” If you had been honest with us from the minute that you walked in the door, we would not be having this conversation. I will finish where I started in my supplementary questions—there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with the Auditor General, but be honest about it. That is all we ask for.
