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 1476 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Universities (Financial Sustainability)
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Ross Greer
No, but it can be a piece of the puzzle. There is no single solution. Actually, the single solution to solving your problem in one go would be to make a vast number of your staff redundant, but I suggest that would have significant negative consequences. Given that, and given my suggestion that no stone should be left unturned, are you making an assessment of all your assets, not just your property portfolio?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Universities (Financial Sustainability)
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Ross Greer
Is that an active consideration?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Universities (Financial Sustainability)
Meeting date: 4 June 2025
Ross Greer
My next point is not unrelated to the point that you have made about maintenance. The capital depreciation figure in your accounts seems to have gone up significantly in recent years. Obviously, the increase will not be even, year on year, given the nature of capital budgets, full stop, as well as the factors that are involved in depreciation in particular. However, the figure seems to have risen significantly. In three years, it goes from £60 million to £117 million—that is the projection for the year after next—so it is nearly doubling. Do you have any detail on why the depreciation figure appears to be rising consistently and quite rapidly?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 28 May 2025
Ross Greer
Minister, you will be aware that the trade union representatives who have appeared before us suggested that the bill gives us an opportunity to increase transparency and perhaps set some stronger rules around senior staff salaries at institutions. As you know, I have a lot of sympathy with that position. In particular, I cannot understand why college principals are exempt from the salary rules that apply to every other chief executive equivalent in the public sector. I am interested in your response to what the unions have put forward in that regard, particularly Mary Senior’s point that the current position makes it harder to argue for public money to go to those institutions when there are many more than 100 members of senior staff at universities in particular who earn far in excess of what the First Minister does—sometimes four times as much.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 28 May 2025
Ross Greer
Up to a point, I understand what you are saying. The reality is that, conditions can be attached to the significant amounts of public funding that an institution receives. I understand the distinction between universities and colleges: universities are independent institutions that compete in a more globalised market. I do not accept that that makes the University of Edinburgh principal’s recent salary increase acceptable.
We have discussed this before, but is it still the Government’s position that college principals should not be subject to the chief executive pay framework that applies to all other equivalent roles across the public sector, other than public-owned companies such as Scottish Water and Scottish Rail Holdings?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 28 May 2025
Ross Greer
Yes.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 28 May 2025
Ross Greer
That is helpful. I have some sympathy with the Universities Scotland position on this. It was also looking for a bit more clarity with regard to the point that Andrew just made about what should be in the bill. There should be something clear there. It should not be too specific—the point of using regulations is that they are more flexible—but there should be something in the bill to give a sufficient degree of clarity over what kind of threshold we are setting.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 28 May 2025
Ross Greer
I know that last week’s Official Report has not been published yet.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 28 May 2025
Ross Greer
Drafting instructions have already been requested on the matter.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 28 May 2025
Ross Greer
I appreciate that. To make broaden out my point—this overlaps somewhat with John Mason’s line of questioning about powers of compulsion in relation to information provision and the Dundee example—two quite different points of view have been put to us, not only in this evidence session but during the past couple of years.
The Educational Institute of Scotland has articulated the issue most clearly. It believes that the SFC has simply not exercised the powers that are already available to it to address poor governance and decision making in relation to not just financial viability but other matters, such as the erosion of fair work principles in particular, at institutions. The alternative position that the previous SFC chief executive articulated—I think that she said this when she last gave evidence to us before leaving the post—was that the SFC had insufficient powers of compulsion in relation to institutions.
The question that I have put to a lot of the witnesses whom we spoken to so far has been about clawback. The SFC can claw back public money that has been provided to anyone that it funds. It is an incredibly blunt tool, and in many situations it would actually make things worse, particularly financial crises. As a result of the bill, would the SFC have sufficient powers to be able to exercise appropriate influence, and do you accept the point that clawback, although perhaps sometimes an effective stick to wield, will not be an effective means of enforcement or compulsion—however you want to word it—nine times out of 10?
