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 1840 contributions
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Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Maggie Chapman
Is there also a role for political leadership in this area? How do you see the political context of debates and discussions around race feeding into that? What should we, as parliamentarians, you, as the EHRC, and all of us who have an interest in and a responsibility with regard to the notion of fostering good relations be doing differently?
10:45
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Maggie Chapman
Thank you. Given that we were talking about SFC matters, I should declare an interest: I am the rector of the University of Dundee,
My next question will cover an issue that you were hinting at there. If we take the notion of how we understand and promote fostering good relations as a tool, how could the Government and local authorities better incorporate it into budget conversations—that is, not only in budget decisions but in all the conversations that lead up to those decisions?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Maggie Chapman
Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I want to focus on balancing characteristics and fostering good relations. It has been a bugbear of mine for some years that there has been limited understanding of, and virtually no conversation about, what fostering good relations means, and you have picked up on that. It has been very much the poor cousin of the various elements of the public sector equality duty. Why do you think that it is so hard for public bodies to grasp what fostering good relations means and what such a process should look like? In your view, what would good practice look like when it comes to fostering good relations?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Maggie Chapman
I will come to the guidance in a moment, but when you talk about confidence, do you mean confidence in doing something or confidence in understanding what fostering good relations means? I think that those are two different things, and I see weaknesses in both. Which are you referring to?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Maggie Chapman
Jennifer, do you want to come in?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Maggie Chapman
Do you get a sense from any of your conversations with Police Scotland, either as part of the uniformed services project or elsewhere, that the notion of balancing needs—as opposed to risks—is sometimes used as an excuse to do nothing?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Maggie Chapman
Can you give us more of a flavour of some of those projects might be, or is it too early to say? One challenge is that the Government says, “We’ve got this money for community cohesion”, but people on the ground wonder what it actually means for them, especially if they live in situations where there is conflict and tension and they feel powerless to resolve it.
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Maggie Chapman
I appreciate that the examples that you have given are indicative and that you have not given an exhaustive list. However, one of my concerns is that, although such work is very valuable and important, people need to opt in, so there is a challenge in how we get those resources and have those conservations in communities that do not want to know about those things. In such communities, there might have been generations of disenfranchisement—there could have been a series of situations that have led people to think that nothing good can come from engaging with the state in a meaningful way.
How can we tackle the structural barriers that prevent the fostering of good relations? We can say that we will have a knit and natter group, for example, but the people who need such groups will not necessarily be the ones who come to them. How can we ensure that it is not just a case of opting in and including people who are already interested in being in these kinds of spaces and having these kinds of conversations?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Maggie Chapman
Do I have time to ask one last question, convener?
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee [Draft]
Public Sector Equality Duty
Meeting date: 13 January 2026
Maggie Chapman
John, you mentioned the police taking a fostering good relations approach in managing different situations in which race, ethnicity and other characteristics in that space are causing flashpoints in communities. Has the EHRC had any conversations with Police Scotland about that? Can you give us a bit more detail? Many communities and many people across Scotland are greatly frustrated by the rising levels of hate, whereby people of colour are being targeted on the streets and the police are doing nothing about it, or are seen to do nothing about it. Can you shed any light on the work that you have done with the police on those issues?
