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 604 contributions
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 13 March 2025
Keith Brown
I have two questions, one of which is for the entire panel. I will ask it first, but if you could answer it second, that would be great—if that makes sense. This might have been implicit in what you have already said, but is it possible for you to give us one ask that you have for the Scottish Government and one ask that you have for the UK Government?
Before you give us those asks, I do not know whether Lisa Whytock is still with us—
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 13 March 2025
Keith Brown
I will ask my second question. If your preferred ask of the Scottish Government is a Scottish export office—as it is Lisa Whytock’s—what would its function be, beyond being an investment source, given that reserved issues such as carnets, immigration, visas and stuff like that are not determined in Scotland?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 13 March 2025
Keith Brown
I have a final question, and I ask you to give a yes or no answer if possible. A lot of people predicted that Brexit would lead to a cultural cul-de-sac, so the issues are not a surprise to people. However, is it more accurate to say that nobody talked about abolishing freedom of movement during the Brexit referendum, and the loss of that is causing the bulk of touring artists’ problems?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 13 March 2025
Keith Brown
We are all gutted about that. Thank you.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 13 March 2025
Keith Brown
I have a very quick final question that follows on from what Professor Basiri just said. I do not know whether you will have views on this, too, Professor Schaffer.
On the point about losing personnel—I note that University College London was mentioned—it seems to me that, because AI is going to dominate in so many areas and because it will be so crucial to the economies of different countries and their future, we should really be a bit more assertive about how we get it. You have mentioned the absence of Erasmus+, and we are not getting what we need currently—because of Brexit, in my view.
However, the fact is that UK Governments past and present have been pathologically opposed to immigration of any kind. When the US did the same thing a number of years ago, they immediately had to reverse it, because they were losing some of the best minds in the world, who could no longer go to universities in the States. Is there a case or any scope for the UK Government to look at either exemptions or special cases, for example, to encourage the best brains to come here?
Moreover, when I was in the military a long time ago, you could get training to be what was then called a telecommunications technician. It involved a year-long course, with a lot of investment from the Government, and anybody who undertook it was obliged to stay in the armed forces for five years. Is there a case for saying that somebody who benefits from a special visa to come here has to pay it back by staying for a period of time? Might that stop the dispersal of personnel elsewhere?
I am just interested in hearing your views on that. Do you want to start, Professor Schaffer?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 13 March 2025
Keith Brown
Thank you.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 13 March 2025
Keith Brown
It is not dissimilar to the use of ethical hackers, who are used in Dundee in particular.
You talked about data; there is a lot of discussion about where Scotland and the UK stand on that. From reading between the lines, it seems that you are suggesting that we—both Scotland and the UK—sometimes big ourselves up to be bigger than we actually are.
You said that we are lagging behind in some areas, especially in recruitment and personnel, but that we are perhaps at the leading edge of technological development in some cases. Is that hampered by the fact that, as far as I know, Scotland does not have a supercomputer? That has been discussed a lot recently in relation to the University of Edinburgh; the supercomputer is going to the Oxford-Cambridge corridor instead. I do not know what you would call it—I do not even know if it relates to AI, to be honest. You have talked about data and storage of data. Is not having that computing power in Scotland a big constraint?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 13 March 2025
Keith Brown
If that is your ask of the Scottish Government, what is your top ask of the UK Government?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 13 March 2025
Keith Brown
I suppose that I was not arguing for something that would require university training to understand it—I am talking about a more basic consumer right. I appreciate Professor Schaffer’s example of a call centre, but it seems to me that that is much more mechanistic; you wait for a few seconds before somebody speaks.
The idea that I am talking about relates mainly to disinformation in either images or language. It also touches on intellectual property; in the next session, we will hear from musicians, as the issue is very important for them. When someone has been using AI, I am not saying that it has to be labelled, but it, and the purposes for which it has been used, should be discoverable.
You mentioned the gap a number of times—there is always a gap—and you have both mentioned how fast moving this area is. Regulation, or policing, often has to catch up with what is developing in a lot of different fields. However, AI is moving so fast that the gap can be huge, and so much can happen before the law catches up with it.
This question might be facetious, and it is probably born of my ignorance. Nonetheless, is it possible to consider—or is it being considered—that AI itself might present the best opportunity for policing and enforcement? If we use AI to anticipate what AI is going to do, we can use it to help to regulate AI. Is that being looked at just now?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 13 March 2025
Keith Brown
In addition, I want to go back to something that Lisa said about Scotland being too small a country to sustain whatever it was—I did not catch the rest of it. It would be useful if we could have your views on that and if you could say how Ireland seems to manage to sustain whatever it is, while we cannot. Colin, will you answer that first?