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 760 contributions
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Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
I do not think that the Parliament as a whole is adequately debating issues such as AI, intellectual property law and the ways in which they are fundamentally reshaping our society. There is a whole sweep of aspects and we could spend hours on a separate inquiry into them. However, I want to try to put the matter into some context. What we loosely call artificial intelligence, which is not at all intelligent, is only one of a range of ways in which the media, including journalism but also broadcasting, is being disrupted and changed. They include the streaming platforms, the social media platforms and changes to the ways in which people consume what they may call news, some of which will actually be news and some of which will not.
I am curious about, in particular, the NUJ’s perspective on that. Although there is potential for new forms of proper journalism and good work including, for example, fact checking to combat disinformation, there are also real dangers that we, as citizens, will end up in a sea of disinformation, with some of us desperately looking for something reliable and many of us not knowing that there is anything reliable to reach for, and that journalists will find themselves in a period of even greater precarity, in terms of their working conditions, than they are at the moment.
You have mentioned the situation that many journalists are already facing. Is there not a danger that, unless we take a much more proactive approach to the regulation of broadcasting more generally—I am talking not just about the traditional broadcasters but about the proliferation of new technologies through which people are consuming content—journalism will become an even more precarious and insecure line of work at the very time when it is most needed?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
There is a wider question about the implications for journalism with regard to the service that it performs, as well as the experience of being a journalist and the precarity involved, and about the change in the relationship between who produces what people think of as news and how it is consumed. If people think of social media influencers in the same way that they used to think of journalists whom they trusted, that fundamentally changes the nature of what is going to be produced and who is going to be producing it. If we do not regulate the broadcast media more generally in a way that has not been done to date and go beyond the traditional broadcasters, is there not a danger that we will see not just the challenges that we are currently facing with regard to disinformation and the lack of trust from viewers and listeners, but the lack of any kind of secure career path for journalists? Those problems are going to be compounded, so surely we need to look at regulating broadcasting in a more robust—and, I should say, multiplatform and 21st century—way.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
If you set up a crowdfunder for that, I will contribute.
Do others have responses to the question about the degree of autonomy that BBC Scotland could or should have and how that relates to the wider regulation of the media landscape?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
Do I have time for a final question, convener?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
I have already downloaded the classic-era “Doctor Who”, so I am safe there.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
Do you think that that sort of thing can be defined in a way that restricts it to the BBC’s economic activity, instead of its content with regard to issues around, say, economic growth being affected?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
Forgive me, but what would be the role of a broadcasting commission?
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
I think that he also said that they would not even pitch it now.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
That is really interesting. Thank you.
Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee [Draft]
Scottish Broadcasting
Meeting date: 8 January 2026
Patrick Harvie
I want to ask about something a little bit narrower and more prosaic. The submissions contain a number of specific proposals on charter renewal, one of which relates to the BBC selling advertising or using paywalls. I am not immersed in this myself, but as a viewer, a listener and a reader, I would say that my instinct would be to recoil from that a little bit. However, I am curious about whether you think that there are any such models that the BBC could use in ways that do not rub up against the expectations of what it ought to be. Is there any way in which those models could be legitimately used?
There is also a proposal to include in the BBC’s remit the responsibility to promote economic growth. In relation to its generation of content, its skills and its investment capacity, there might be an argument for giving the BBC an economic remit, but is there a danger that that would feed into its content and editorial choices instead of its being seen merely as a statement of how it creates and stimulates economic activity in broadcasting?
