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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 3405 contributions
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 19 June 2025
Sue Webber
We have also heard that the recall thresholds that have been set out in the bill could make it harder to recall regional MSPs than constituency MSPs—although your bill is trying to achieve parity—and constituency MSPs who represent larger urban areas compared with those who represent rural areas. It is all about the volume of people. Have you considered whether changes are needed to address that?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 19 June 2025
Sue Webber
Okay. I will see whether I can think of anything other than just accepting it. If you are in a region that has multiple members on the list representing that region, our party certainly splits things up a little bit and we all focus on a few areas rather than covering everything. If we are talking about region-wide recall, it goes back to an individual’s awareness of who their regional MSPs might be—it could be minimal.
Thinking back to your response to the other question, I am not certain of awareness in a region of how far down the rankings an MSP such as Jamie Greene, as an example, was the last time. All of that links to awareness and something that connects with the voters so that they are aware of what is going on. Do you have any thoughts about that? It is quite a broad question.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 19 June 2025
Sue Webber
That is a fair point, Mr Simpson.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 19 June 2025
Sue Webber
Mr Simpson, how do you respond to the concerns that have been expressed to the committee about the financial and administrative burden of the proposed regional recall petition process, as well as to some of the voter confusion issues that have been raised and put to us?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 19 June 2025
Sue Webber
Yes, and I know that Ms Roddick might talk about that later.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 19 June 2025
Sue Webber
Circling back to the regional list, we are elected because of the party and, as you said, nobody really knows who is on that list or their ranking. Some might say that how that happens is quite a dark art.
When people have voted for a party and never once for an individual—they have only ever voted for the party that is on that second part of the ballot that has so many of us in it—can you not see why there needs to be a clear and straightforward mechanism when someone comes off that list because they have switched party?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 19 June 2025
Sue Webber
That addresses the financial point, but we have also heard a lot about the administrative burden on local authorities. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 19 June 2025
Sue Webber
Colleagues will ask about that six-week period later on.
On voter confusion, I am not speaking ill of voters, but we have many different electoral systems in Scotland, and your proposed system would be yet another. What are your comments on that?
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 19 June 2025
Sue Webber
Yes. You have said that a few times.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 19 June 2025
Sue Webber
It is human nature.