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 2056 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Michael Marra
Is the Scottish Funding Council competent to deal with this issue, particularly given the fire that is running through the sector?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Michael Marra
Secondly, you mentioned earlier that the proposal was put forward by yourself, but there did not appear to be any analysis of that—there was just a letter that came back in response. Do you think that the Funding Council scrutinised the proposal, or was that a political response?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Michael Marra
I will close with this point, convener. In the conversations that I have with staff, they tell me that, from day to day, many things are not working in the institution. As people will understand, when you take out the number of staff that the university has done, both through the voluntary severance scheme and through people resigning from key posts, grants do not get signed off and approval cannot be got for posts or expenditure in different areas.
You have talked a little bit about this already, Professor Seaton. Given that level of change, is there any way in which people can be heard? When people tell me about not being able to get those critical decisions pushed through in an institution—and, as some have told me, this is about the wages that they get in their bank accounts and about grants that are not being signed off but which are sitting on executive-level desks instead—is there any way in which I can raise that directly? Given the turmoil, is there any means that you can create internally—or any problem-solving, star-chamber approach that you can take—to ensure that those things get sorted in order to make the organisation work?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Michael Marra
Thank you both for coming today. I will start with the issue of prioritising buildings instead of people. One of the key things that staff tell me is how they feel when they hear that a surplus has to be generated in order to make buildings nicer while they are potentially losing their livelihoods, which will cause the city to lose wages and the economy to suffer. Do you understand how that feels, Professor Seaton?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Michael Marra
Are you talking about the conditions for the overall annual grant that the university receives?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Michael Marra
The case that you are making is that the capital investment is mission critical for the university, because it is about ensuring safety—is that what you are saying?
To quite a lot of people, it feels like it is more about buildings getting a coat of paint and looking nicer in order to attract people in. Can you give a commitment that you are not just generating a surplus to build up white elephants or create vanity projects? Can you assure people that the aim is to meet the needs of the institution, the students and the staff?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Michael Marra
At the start of the meeting, you said that the letter presented by the Funding Council identified two elements where there were problems and that you were told not to progress with reorganisation or with redundancies. Those two elements were therefore rejected, but you have not been impeded from taking action on them. From conversations I have had in the past week, I understand that the information about the reorganisation went out in an email to staff, who say that it is progressing although, at the time, they had heard from the Government that it would not be allowed. Setting aside for a moment the real human consequences of redundancies, there is a lack of clarity and people still do not really know what is happening. Do you accept that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Michael Marra
When are we likely to see an outcome on that? I believe that there was some concern from court members about whether they might be liable with regard to that loan. The latest that we heard was that the loan was to be effectively turned into a grant. Is that not the case?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Michael Marra
I am afraid that we have already asked—the committee has had members of the Funding Council in front of it—and clarity was not forthcoming.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 29 October 2025
Michael Marra
In that case, I will turn to progress on governance, which various members have touched on. One of the first recommendations in the Gillies report was about the presentation of financial reports to court. The convener has already touched on the lack of transparency in that respect, and you are going to reflect on that. Do you feel that sufficient financial information is now being presented to court?
I will take Mr Hamill first on that.
