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 1696 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Michael Marra
But the head count was going up. At a point when £35 million of savings had been allocated in the budget, the head count was increasing. Mr McGeorge, what do you think of the decisions to continue to recruit more and more people?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Michael Marra
The finance team. Who would have been responsible for it at that stage?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Michael Marra
Sorry—I meant to say “July 2024”; we are not quite at July 2025 yet. I think the principal would still be saying that now, however, if he had not been caught.
I turn to the issue of the cash position; we might come back to the recruitment side. The Gillies report directly identifies the huge amounts of on-going expenditure. In our evidence session today, you have said that the finance team was underresourced. Instead, you had a massive expansion in the number of academics. Did you not make the case that your finance function needed more resource to ensure that you had a resilient organisation, whereas you were employing hundreds of additional academics?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Michael Marra
Did you not make the case to say that there was underresourcing of that capacity, of which we have seen clear evidence today?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Michael Marra
You did not. However, you were on the UEG, and you continued to sanction massive expenditure across the whole organisation.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Michael Marra
When did you take that advice?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Michael Marra
At the meeting of court on 12 November, a note was issued to say, please—
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Michael Marra
You were surprised. So, you thought that £40 million was theoretically ring fenced and suddenly you were surprised that it was gone, despite the fact that you were the person who was sanctioning the expenditure on the kind of capital programmes that Peter Fotheringham spoke about. Is it a surprise to you, Mr Fotheringham, that Jim McGeorge did not realise that £40 million had disappeared?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Michael Marra
It sounds like you did. A big part of this is the rapid deterioration of the cash position that has left the university exposed so that it cannot make the kind of manoeuvres that other institutions can make. For example, the University of Aberdeen is in perhaps the second or third round of voluntary severances, whereas the University of Dundee was not in a position to do that; it had no money to do so due to the rapid expenditure of that money. Mr Fotheringham, were you not sounding alarms about the expenditure side of this when you could see that the cash position was deteriorating so rapidly?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Michael Marra
During that period of time, management accounts were not presented to the UEG in periods 9, 10 and 11. Is there any justification for those missing accounts? Mr Fotheringham, was that before, during or after your period of employment?
