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 857 contributions
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Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Alasdair Allan
As has been touched on, reporting is crucial in all of this. Recent crofting legislation has changed the people who are tasked with reporting on non-compliance. Will the bill improve the process of reporting on non-compliance and remove some of the need for neighbours to describe the activities of their neighbours, which is obviously not an ideal or workable situation?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Alasdair Allan
Resource has been mentioned, too. Are there provisions in the bill that would free up resource and allow the commission to concentrate on the task—it is not your only task but, ultimately, it is part of your responsibility, as you have described—of taking tenancies off people if a croft is abandoned? Are there provisions that would free you up to do some of that?
10:00Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Alasdair Allan
The issue has been raised with the committee on trips. I am not trying to pretend that it is apocalyptic, but questions have been raised with us about who might acquire shares in common land and why.
I will move on to the other scenario that you mentioned about the future. The bill gives crofters and grazings committees new opportunities to use common grazings for environmental purposes. At present, are common grazings committees resourced, equipped and able to hold money to the extent that might be needed to do all those things? Does the bill assist with any of that?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Alasdair Allan
I saw the same croft as the convener did, and, without referring to it too specifically, it raises a few questions in my mind that have also come up in other contexts.
It would be fair to say that most crofters are quite enthusiastic about finding ways of including care of the environment in legislation and giving it due recognition. I suppose that, as the convener has outlined, some of that comes down to enforcement and some of it comes down to whether the enforcement procedure is more than a desktop exercise when it tries to judge between active environmental management and abandonment. Would it be fair to say that one of the questions that has been asked of the commission in the past is about how it ensures that more crofts are visited and seen rather than judged from afar?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Alasdair Allan
I have one more question on that issue. Section 2 removes the 28-day time limits when a crofter applies for consent to use their croft for another purposeful use or when a crofter applies for permission to be temporarily absent. Why is that being changed? It is the Government’s decision to write the legislation, but what is your understanding of why that is in there? Will that be useful to you or to the process? Will it help to deal with things promptly? Does that just give you more time?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Alasdair Allan
I am not a crofter.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee [Draft]
Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
Alasdair Allan
I do not disagree with anything that you have said about the fact that the landscape has changed and that many people want to use crofts and grazings for different things. However, to push back a little, do you recognise the fear that some potential new entrants might have that they could find it difficult to obtain a croft with the necessary grazings to do what they want to do—to keep animals on the common grazings—if, in some places, the trend of separating grazing shares from crofts was to be completely unchecked?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 11 September 2025
Alasdair Allan
Alison Turnbull, I am conscious that there has been a lot of interest in the internal workings of HES. You will be more than aware that there is also a lot of interest in the outcomes in communities from the money that is being spent. Specifically, people are keen to see much-loved historic buildings in their communities reopen. I am conscious that there has been a high-level masonry survey and all sorts of other things going on, but there is an awful lot of interest in finding out what the outputs are and whether those buildings are reopening to the public.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 11 September 2025
Alasdair Allan
What I am driving at is this: how many buildings that were open pre-pandemic are still to reopen?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 11 September 2025
Alasdair Allan
I want to pick up on the point that was made about mainstreaming and the point that was made about health by Anne Lyden, who anticipated my question. In the past, the committee has taken an interest in what more we can do to more fully mainstream funding in the sector, so that we reap not only the health benefits but the benefits relating to people being actively involved in their communities, volunteering and so on.
In Norway, there is a word for the moral sense of responsibility to volunteer that all Norwegians feel: dugnad. I am not sure that we have quite reached that point in Scotland, but are we making progress in that direction? I am thinking about big public agencies, such as the national health service, remembering culture in the way that they structure what they do. I address that question to anyone who feels that it is relevant, but the point was first mentioned by Anne Lyden.
