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]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
However, the Government does not have any overt concerns, other than the unknown unknowns. Perhaps it will depend on where the committee lands in its stage 1 report or what happens further down the line.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
In a petition situation, what do we do about unidentified groups that do not register and may potentially be subject to legislation if they can be identified and they fall foul of something? There are legitimate examples—I am thinking back to Jersey, where there is a “none of the above” option when there is only one candidate. In the last election there, there was an orchestrated, anonymous campaign to ensure that “none of the above” won. You could not identify who was funding it or where the correspondence and the social media posts were coming from, but, clearly, the campaign was successful in the first round—then there were changes because there was a re-election at that point. Are there concerns about that, and has work been done and thought been given to how we would deal with that matter here?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
Do you see the bill as the vehicle to do that?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
I hope that such an event will never happen, but if it does, rather than its sitting in a cycle that people have got used to—which has happened because we have seen some challenges with all the voting systems in Scotland at some stage—does the Government recognise that there would need to be an education element to the process for the voters to understand what they were doing?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
That is fine.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
Has the Scottish Government thought about whether, were Scottish Government responsibilities to occasion it—although that seems unlikely—an absence of that length should be noted as reasonable? As ministers and cabinet secretaries, you are, first and foremost, MSPs.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
So, effectively, no additional costs would fall on local authorities in respect of either a regional by-election or a constituency one.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Scottish Parliament (Recall and Removal of Members) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
The minister has raised the question of the commencement date. What is the Scottish Government’s proposal with regard to that? We are now looking at not having legislation in place by the Holyrood election next May, which means that we will have an unknown unknown field, albeit—let us be honest—in relation to a very small element of the electoral system that, I hope, will not be tested for a long time. What is the Government’s view on the time that it would need to facilitate secondary legislation?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Dual Mandates
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
Is the Scottish Government’s settled view that a grace period would be after, rather than before, the Scottish election? In that case, an MP would not be required to step down prior to the election; they would do so as a consequence of being elected as an MSP.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Dual Mandates
Meeting date: 12 June 2025
Martin Whitfield
You can prevent people from being returned.
