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 1808 contributions
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Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Dual Mandates
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
I am sorry—I did not mean to talk across you.
10:30Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Dual Mandates
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
That is helpful.
Sue, do you want to come in?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Dual Mandates
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
Explore it. This is a different sort of evidence session—
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Dual Mandates
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
There is nothing wrong with seeking clarification. I bring in Rona Mackay.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Dual Mandates
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
There is an interesting dual mandate that we could go into.
Graham Simpson, is there anything that—as an MSP—you would like to contribute or ask the minister?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Dual Mandates
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
It is a dual mandate. We have to think about the time period rather than how it came about.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
Let us start with your small question and then we can come to Rona Mackay.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
It is not the councils—
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
I have a couple of questions, the first of which is about how close the numbers in the proposed constituencies and regions are to the previous ones. Did you take as your baseline the electorate number back in September, rather than using the numbers from when the current constituencies and regions were set? It seemed to me to make sense to look at the figures that were used in the previous review and to work within 5, 10 or up to 15 per cent of those, rather than taking the baseline of the electorate and saying that, we should have a certain number of people within the constituencies at the end of the process. The change is interesting because it reflects population and demographic movement, but there is also a question about whether you are getting closer to the Venice commission’s proposals for a code along with the four rules.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
I was not suggesting that you do—my apologies if you took it that way. You obviously take account of all the responses that you get. The process is slightly dark, so the public do not see how an individual response can essentially lead to small changes, but it can do, as you said.
Moving forward, one challenge is that the public are the group of people who genuinely need to have confidence in the system—we can use the population or the electorate, and an interesting discussion is to be had about that. Rightly, we are the last Parliament in Europe that still involves itself only to an extent and we step away from the process, and so there must be public confidence that, first, the process is understandable; secondly, they can see what their influence is; and, thirdly, even if the result disagrees with what they want, they understand why it has been reached.
13:45You commented on the adversarial nature of inquiries and how everyone shoves the problem on to somebody else, and you are the people who are actually having to do that. Edinburgh is a classic example of just moving it around the wheel, with everyone complaining. The rules for the inquiry process are here, in essence, whereas the four rules and the regional rules sit within the Scotland Act 1998, so they are much harder to change from our point of view.
However, the trigger for an inquiry sits with Boundaries Scotland, does it not? Well, not quite with you, but a more co-operative and solution-focused public inquiry could be looked at, as you say.
