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.
Filter your results Hide all filters
Displaying 1825 contributions
|
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Michael Marra
Mr Drummond?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Michael Marra
The convener has highlighted an event that affected all five and a half million of us in profound ways, and the issue of how to garner the information. However, we are trying to use the same process for the Covid inquiry as we are for the tragic circumstances that happened one afternoon in Kirkcaldy and which involved about 20 people. That inquiry has been going on for six years now. Are we not trying to have a one-size-fits-all legislative approach to incredibly different things, and is that not partly why we are coming up against these challenges?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Michael Marra
From your evidence, it is clear that your practice is focused on that kind of interaction with victims, particularly in relation to cases of service failure.
You mentioned bricks-and-mortar inquiries. Are there other categories that you can think of into which any of the current public inquiries and the plethora of public inquiries that we have had over the past decade might fall?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Michael Marra
What is stopping people from using them?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Michael Marra
I am broadly supportive of the direction of travel, but, Mr Henderson, you say in your submission that it is a polluter-pays principle. It strikes me that the people who made the pollution are not the people who are paying here. In many circumstances, it will be people who have changed practice and who are building responsibly. None of that dismisses the fact that we need money to do the retrofitting to ensure that we can do the remediation in the buildings.
Is it fair to say that there is not really a polluter-pays principle at the heart of the design of the tax? Is it really just a way of getting money to do something that needs to be done?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Michael Marra
Valid comparisons have been made with the rest of the UK in relation to building regulations, and the culture and politics around all of that. In the rest of the UK, 5,190 buildings have been identified, remediation work has started on 2,490 and, of those, work on 1,767 has been completed. Do you have any idea why there is such a difference—between two and 1,767?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Michael Marra
Could you explain the disparity in the figures? It is good that you have cross-border expertise, but could you explain why there is a difference in the number of projects that are being undertaken and the completion rate?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Michael Marra
It would be useful to the committee, because we have talked about hypothecation—the purpose of the tax. This is really a tax to raise money to do this work. We want that work to be done, so it is good for us to be able to understand the barriers to that work being completed.
I put on the record my involvement in the Grenfell inquiry, through the Leverhulme research centre for forensic science.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 7 October 2025
Michael Marra
That is useful.
My closing point is that you have set quite a lot of store in your evidence about people campaigning for justice through the process and winning a public inquiry. That involves gaining impetus for change and justice, but we see a pattern in which recommendations are forthcoming many years after the initial events when some of that impetus has perhaps dissipated, because Governments face no real pressure to follow through and deliver on the recommendations that have been made. Do you worry about the lack of implementation of recommendations, and are the delay in time and the dissipation of impetus part of the problem?
Criminal Justice Committee, Health Social Care and Sport Committee, and Social Justice and Social Security Committee (Joint Meeting) [Draft]
Reducing Drug Deaths and Tackling Problem Drug Use
Meeting date: 2 October 2025
Michael Marra
Okay. You also said that you felt there had been a decline in medical emergencies of late, and I think that you referred to the shift into cocaine. Can you set out in a little bit more detail for us why that would be the case?
