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 868 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 17 June 2025
Craig Hoy
That is great. Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 17 June 2025
Craig Hoy
Good morning, gentlemen. A number of the points that I was going to raise have already been covered, so I will not duplicate them.
Mr Sturrock, I have a question on the implementation of recommendations. Obviously, the public’s expectation is that an inquiry will be wide reaching and fair and will reach conclusions. However, there seems to be an implementation gap. Why is there such slow and scant implementation of some of the more fundamental recommendations that come out of public inquiries?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 17 June 2025
Craig Hoy
In your submission, you suggest three potential ways of toughening up the accountability for implementation: a parliamentary committee could be established, a statutory body could be given that responsibility or a ministerial accountability panel could be set up, as has happened in relation to fatal accident inquiry recommendations. All those suggestions appear to have some merit. Have you given any thought to which of those might be the most effective way of approaching the implementation of public inquiry recommendations?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 17 June 2025
Craig Hoy
Mr Campbell, it was mentioned earlier that you suggested that there could perhaps be an annual parliamentary debate on the progress of public inquiries. One of the frustrations of many MSPs is that we have annual debates on a number of things, such as targets that have been missed, and we then have the same debate the following year, but it does not get to the root cause of the problem that we are trying to solve.
Would there be any merit in revisiting the original legislation on public inquiries with a view to providing an element of compulsion or a mandatory implementation mechanism that would make it incumbent on Government not only to set up public inquiries but to formally respond in a timely manner, by identifying actions to solve the problems and to prevent the same mistakes from being made again in the future?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 17 June 2025
Craig Hoy
There is a sense, which was referred to earlier, that ministers are very keen to get the issue off their desk and that that is why they will pass it on to a public inquiry. There is a view that the report then sits on the minister’s desk eight years later, gathering dust, and nothing happens with it. A method that forced the Government to adopt the recommendations of an inquiry would, I presume, have two effects: inquiries would be more effective in the sense that actions would flow from them, and ministers might also be less keen to establish them if they thought that they would be held accountable for the recommendations. Should we look at that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 17 June 2025
Craig Hoy
It might actually want buildings that go millions of pounds over budget, in other words. [Laughter.]
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fiscal Commission (Economic and Fiscal Forecasts)
Meeting date: 10 June 2025
Craig Hoy
That reminds me of a chief executive officer with whom I worked, who used to say to the sales teams, “Don’t tell me how much you did sell—tell me how much you didn’t sell and what you didn’t bring in.”
Let us look at what, in a sense, the Scottish Government has not brought in. You made a projection that said that the top rate of tax—the 48 per cent rate—should have brought in £53 million in 2024-25, but, in the end, the Scottish Government realised just £8 million. That was from one of your previous reports. The top rate applies to those who earn more than £124,000 or so. What would be the reason for such a significant difference between what you estimated would be brought in by a certain tax policy and the net result, which was significantly less?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost Effectiveness)
Meeting date: 10 June 2025
Craig Hoy
There is a sense that ministers are passing the buck when they put in place a public inquiry and that they want it off their desk as quickly as possible. The report might end up on their desk, gathering dust, 10 years later. If the Government and the Scottish ministers had to foot the entire bill for a public inquiry, might they think twice before instituting one, and might they be more discriminating as to what should go to a public inquiry?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost Effectiveness)
Meeting date: 10 June 2025
Craig Hoy
Good morning. Mr McGowan, in your submission, you referenced the Angiolini inquiry and made the point that non-statutory inquiries do not have powers of compulsion. How important is it for inquiries to have that power, given that, in that example, people seemed to co-operate with the inquiry without it?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost Effectiveness)
Meeting date: 10 June 2025
Craig Hoy
Given their nature, both the COPFS and the police are legitimately brought into the process of a public inquiry quite frequently. It has been recommended that a body be established somewhere to deal with public inquiries, rather than each organisation having to reinvent the wheel, as I think it was described. Would that aid you in your own engagement? If you were working with a constant secretariat, you would not have to rebuild relationships each time another public inquiry came along.
