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
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
We want to give stability to taxpayers, and so we feel that we have probably gone as far as we should go. We have asked those with the broadest shoulders to pay a bit more, which has helped us with, for example, tackling child poverty. Scotland is the only part of the UK where child poverty rates are falling. That does not happen accidentally; it comes from investment in tackling child poverty, and that investment has come from those with the broadest shoulders paying a bit more, although the majority of Scottish taxpayers will still pay less.
You are right that thresholds will be frozen, but that is the case in the rest of the UK as well. If I remember rightly, the previous UK Government set a policy to freeze the thresholds until 2028, and the current Labour UK Government has continued with that. We believe that the tax strategy that has been laid out strikes the right balance in giving certainty about there being no further changes to tax thresholds until the end of this parliamentary session. That is the right thing to do.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
As you well know, that is not what the First Minister said.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
The key difference is the granular detail of what the plan will involve. That relates to a point that Michelle Thomson made about data. Ivan McKee is going much more into the detail of the figures relating to each and every public body, and every public body will be tasked with making its own plans for savings and reform down to a level of detail that might have been absent when there was a higher-level requirement for efficiency savings across the board, or for policies that were quite broad in nature. The difference is that each and every public body will be required to deliver a plan for efficiency, reform, sharing services and doing things differently. Doing nothing will not be an option, and the reform will be far more directed.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
I will come back to you, because some of those points are still to be agreed with COSLA.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
I might have misspoken when I said that. “Misspoken” might be too strong a term, but I would rephrase it. It is more that Councillor Hagmann has been engaging with Opposition spokespeople on COSLA’s behalf, which is absolutely fine. We will do the next phase, which is about building consensus, jointly. I hope that makes sense.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
There was no scorecard that said, “This is the range of options and this is compared with that.” There were ministerial discussions on a number of occasions about what evidence other organisations, including child poverty organisations, had brought to us. I mentioned some of them earlier. As one, they said that other things could be done but that that was the one thing that would make the biggest impact. Ministers were being challenged by the First Minister to look at what more could be done to tackle child poverty, and that was the one option that emerged with support from all the child poverty organisations.
11:15Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
The advice that came back was about costings and the likely impact on the number of children who would be kept out of poverty. The 15,000 figure has been superseded to some degree by the Fraser of Allander Institute saying that it could be higher than that and that
“20,000 children would be kept out of poverty”.
At the time, that work was presented to us in terms of the costings. The SFC has now given us its analysis of the costings, which is at the higher end of what we had thought.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
It is the third sector organisations that we took advice from. Bearing in mind the fact that we have a statutory duty to reduce child poverty rates, the First Minister asked us to go further in tackling child poverty and so he charged us to go further in discussions with those child poverty organisations. Mitigating the two-child cap was their clear recommendation to us.
After ministers discussed that at some length, we asked for costings and how many children would be lifted out of poverty and so on, and that is what is in front of Parliament, for it to vote for or not to vote for.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
No. No ministerial direction has been required. In the context of civil service, every policy and spend will be reminders of the overall fiscal position and sustainability. That happens with every policy. However, Michael, your party wanted us to do it from this April, which would have had an even bigger cost, about which the Scottish Fiscal Commission might have had something to say. I think that we are all agreed on the policy.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Shona Robison
In advance of September, I am happy to brigade together, across portfolios, the projects that are in the public domain. One of the largest projects is HMP Glasgow—there is considerable capital investment in that new prison—and I have talked about affordable housing. We could brigade other projects together across portfolios if that would be helpful.
The infrastructure investment plan will give a line of sight for multiyear projects—when they will begin their process, the earlier stages in the business cases and their delivery. We need multiyear capital envelopes in order to give certainty to the public sector in relation to taking forward projects.
In response to your question, convener, if we can provide further information across portfolios, and if it would be helpful to brigade that information in one place in advance of that work, I will be happy to come back to the committee with that.
