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 1841 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
I understand that, and it is a fair challenge.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
I will have to come back to you on that, if that is okay.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
I just want to add, on flexibilities, that we have agreed that, for each and every year, SNIB will have access to up to £25 million of the Scotland reserve to deposit funding that can be carried forward into the next financial year, which will help with its cash flow.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
We would expect every portfolio to be very alive both to what the organisations in it bring to economic growth and to the importance of that in relation to everything that they do.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
I thought that the session with the SFC on that was interesting, because it said that it boils down to the lack of levers because of the fiscal framework—a point that you have made on a number of occasions. The SFC said that it is one of the few flexible pots of funding that we have, given the constraints on borrowing, the reserve and all the rest of it.
The SFC also said that it is not unreasonable to use the ScotWind money to smooth through that year, particularly when we look at 2027-28 and see the spending review looking like a V and then improving. If we had not done that, we would have had to make some major reductions to funding lines, including the main ones, such as local government, health and social security. That was the alternative in the absence of any other lever to smooth through that year. However, our track record shows that we have been effective in reversing out ScotWind allocations that we have made in previous years, because we recognise that we do not want to utilise that money for resource spending. We have been successful in reversing those allocations out and our intention would be to reverse as much as possible in 2027-28 for use in future years.
As I said earlier, I do not believe that the UK Government’s spending review outlook, on which we are basing our outlook, will hold in its current form, given that we are heading towards a general election in 2029. The figures for 2027-28 and 2028-29 will change, for sure, in terms of the funding available.
The choice that we had was either to smooth things out through the use of ScotWind money or to show significant reductions, which we would have to plan for now.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
We have responded through the immediate spending review outlook. Indeed, it is why the fiscal sustainability delivery plan sets out efficiency savings that go quite far and quite deep in reducing corporate costs, with a reduction of 0.5 per cent over the course of the year, or around 11,500 full-time-equivalent posts. That will mean delivering services differently.
All of that will help ensure that, by the end of the period, we are in such a position that the books are balanced and the changes that need to be made in the transformation of services have been made. The public sector will be smaller at the end of that period, due to all those levers.
As for the wider, longer-term outlook beyond that, I would say two things. First, there has to be a fundamental review of the fiscal framework. I have made that point many times, and I have raised it many times with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Commentators in the main are supportive of our view that our levers are very constrained when it comes to smoothing out rocky periods in the flow of resource funding. It does not flow evenly, but our levers in that respect are very constrained.
The second thing is the demographic changes that are coming, which will require us to go further and faster with the transformation of services and with the use of more preventative spend to prevent people ending up in hospital and to address the exponential growth in the over-80s. All of that has to be looked at in combination with all of our front-line public services. We are really in the foothills with some of the automation and digitisation approaches, but we need to expand all that.
That would be my response: we are absolutely doing these things. All the work that is on-going in the immediate period will need to be stepped up if we are to be able to take on that demographic challenge.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
We would expect the savings that are being made to be reinvested in further savings, so we would want a bit of a cranking up to happen—
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
The £30 million last year was really to oil the wheels of change, but the wheels then have to keep going within each organisation, rather than—
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
I am sorry—it is table 4.15, convener.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Shona Robison
No. I have set out what we know in the spending review, which is that we have flat cash, and I am saying that no spending review has ever stayed the same—none. It was the same under the previous Conservative Government. No spending review remains as it is set out; it always shifts. All I am saying is that, on the basis of the history of what has always happened with spending reviews, there will be movement on the figures. We have tried to say, on the basis of what we know for sure, what it will look like, but all past spending reviews have moved and shifted in a positive direction, and that is what I expect to happen.
For 2026-27, there has been a real-terms increase in local government funding on the basis of the funding that is available to us, which I have set out.
