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 925 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 17 December 2025
Lorna Slater
Where does the environmental assessment for that sit? If we are working in bits and pieces, as Mr Gough suggests, with one bill creating digital assets, another bill regulating them in the banking sector and something else to regulate them elsewhere, and if we are seeing the growth of the data centres and computing power needed to manage all of that and to generate some of the assets, where is the environmental assessment happening? Things are growing behind the scenes, so where will we do the assessment to see how that fits into the Scottish economy?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 17 December 2025
Lorna Slater
It is a fast-changing and dynamic playing field, as it were. Would it therefore make sense to put regulation-making powers in the bill, so that the Scottish Government can react more flexibly and use secondary legislation to keep up with things, instead of having to go to primary legislation to make such regulations in the future?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 17 December 2025
Lorna Slater
The subject of my first question has already been touched on, but I will ask the minister to extrapolate a bit. It is about what regulations or legislation might be needed to apply to digital assets in the future, in order to protect institutions such as banking systems, to support Scottish or European Union interests, to hinder bad-faith actors, to protect investments, and so on. As I understand it, the bill simply makes digital assets exist in Scots law; it does not provide any further regulations for the protection of anybody. What intentions does the Scottish Government have to consider such regulations in the future?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 17 December 2025
Lorna Slater
Thank you for that explanation. I understand that the regulation-making powers in the bill are relatively narrow in order stay within the scope of the bill. As you suggest, allowing powers to modify regulations that might affect the whole banking sector would not be within the competence either of this Parliament or of the bill. That is helpful. Thank you.
My second line of questioning is about environmental concerns. The generation of some digital assets requires an enormous amount of energy—for example, because of the amount of number crunching that is required to generate bitcoins. I realise that the bill would not, by itself, make digital assets exist, because they already exist and all that we are doing is recognising that. However, other stakeholders and witnesses have told us that they want the sector to grow and that recognising digital assets will prompt investment, which implies that there will be environmental overheads and an environmental impact from energy generation. Has the Scottish Government considered that? Where do environmental concerns sit in relation to digital assets?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 3 December 2025
Lorna Slater
Thank you. I understand that.
While I have the floor, I will ask some other questions on the same themes. We have narrowed in on particular definitions of digital assets. Professor Buchanan advocates that only crypto-style tokens and that technology should be the basis for the definition on the basis of immutability. How do Mr Ferry and Mr Gray feel about restricting the definition or using the more broad definition that the bill uses?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 3 December 2025
Lorna Slater
That is how I have understood it. Thank you.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 3 December 2025
Lorna Slater
We have touched on this already, so I will not go over the same ground, but I want to get your general thoughts on the record about how future proofed the bill is. If I understand the bill’s intention properly, it is a starting point. It establishes the existence of digital assets in Scottish law, and from that point onwards, we have the opportunity to bring in regulations, definitions, guidance and that kind of thing if we want. Given that it is just a starting point and the technology is emerging very quickly, what are your thoughts on the definition of digital assets and how future proofed it is? Have we largely got it right?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 3 December 2025
Lorna Slater
Just to clarify, do the electronic trading documents that Professor Yüksel Ripley mentioned exist separately from the law, or would that point need to be clarified in guidance or elsewhere?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 3 December 2025
Lorna Slater
Are housing deeds an example, or is that a totally different thing? I am sorry; I am opening up a whole thing—do not go there. [Laughter.]
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 3 December 2025
Lorna Slater
I can certainly do that, convener.
Professor Buchanan, I want you to help me to understand something that we discussed with our witnesses in committee last week, which is the nature of the term “immutable”. In the case of this bill, it is probably a legal term rather than a technical one. If I understood what was being said, “immutable” in this context does not mean that it cannot ever be changed; it means that it can only be changed in a tracked way. It seems to me that that would apply to both the distributed ledger and the permissive ledger, as long as you knew who had permission to change it, as opposed to a mechanism in which anybody could change it and where there is no traceability of those changes. Is that your understanding of the term “immutable”?
