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 2603 contributions
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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Auditor General for Scotland (Work Programme)
Meeting date: 30 April 2025
Colin Beattie
I think that the document is good and quite strong overall, and it picks up on a lot of areas that the committee will be interested in. I will ask about one or two of those.
When the committee has discussed integration authorities with you in the past, we have always been concerned about the funding for them in respect of staffing and the commitment behind that, and we have heard anecdotal evidence that points to a possible unwillingness on the part of the NHS to pay its share into the IJBs. Can you tell us a bit more about the work that you are planning to do on the financing and performance of the IJBs?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Auditor General for Scotland (Work Programme)
Meeting date: 30 April 2025
Colin Beattie
It would be useful to see the picture right across the board, as opposed to having snapshots of individual colleges. Those are useful and important, but we would like to see the overall financial health of the whole sector and to know what the performance is, because reporting is about performance as well as finance.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Auditor General for Scotland (Work Programme)
Meeting date: 30 April 2025
Colin Beattie
That sounds fair enough. To move on slightly, fiscal sustainability is a big thing—you touched on it earlier. I note that you intend to look at the tax policy and the opportunities and risks of using tax as a way to achieve fiscal sustainability.
There is a problem, of course, with tax, in that it is kind of one-sided. We do not have all the levers, and it is difficult to balance tax across the economy when we do not have that control. Can you tell us a bit more about your planned work on fiscal sustainability, particularly in relation to tax, and how it will support the work of the Parliament and particularly that of the Finance and Public Administration Committee, for which it will be of interest?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Auditor General for Scotland (Work Programme)
Meeting date: 30 April 2025
Colin Beattie
Certainly, the IJBs are key for primary and local healthcare, which are under increasing strain. It will be interesting to see what comes out of that work.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Auditor General for Scotland (Work Programme)
Meeting date: 30 April 2025
Colin Beattie
As Graham Simpson has mentioned, I have an interest in my own area in the Musselburgh flood protection scheme—I do not know whether you have looked at that at all. It was a relatively small scheme that is now, depending on how many options are taken, costing well over £100 million, and Government finance appears to be uncertain, or at best indicative.
The scheme has taken about three years to get to where it is, mainly as a result of objections that were raised locally. The whole process has been quite byzantine in its complexity when it comes to things progressing through the system—and, indeed, has been quite controversial, in that interested third parties have been part of the decision-making process. That has been subject to objections, too. I do not know whether you have looked at the scheme, but it is certainly one of the more complicated ones on the go at the moment, both financially and technically.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Auditor General for Scotland (Work Programme)
Meeting date: 30 April 2025
Colin Beattie
I will move on slightly. You are going to produce a briefing on education and skills reform, which will help to inform, or to provide scoping for, audit work after the election. I have a specific question about colleges in that regard, because they have been very much in the news for a long time, particularly with regard to their fiscal sustainability, but I noticed that, in your plans, you talk about publishing a briefing in October this year. A briefing is not an audit, and yet the colleges are such an important element of what we are looking at. Is there a possibility of upgrading the briefing in order to take a more comprehensive approach to looking at colleges?
In previous parliamentary sessions, we have had a very comprehensive audit across the whole span of colleges, including all the link-ups between colleges and information on how they are all doing. Rather than seeing them one by one, we saw them altogether and could therefore understand the whole issue around colleges and what they face, because one size does not fit all and not all colleges are in the same state.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Auditor General for Scotland (Work Programme)
Meeting date: 30 April 2025
Colin Beattie
According to your overview, you expect to publish that report in November 2025.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Colin Beattie
To pick up on what you say about the data, one of the recurring themes in evidence to the committee in the past has been that the data is not always consistent. It is not always produced by councils in the same way, and so compatibility becomes a problem and you do not get the results that you want. Are you satisfied that there will be consistency in the data?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Colin Beattie
Coming back to the Auditor General, surely, when the audit was taking place, questions would have been asked and someone would have been able to answer them. There is no evidence of that in the report.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Colin Beattie
The Auditor General does not refer to any potential fraud or irregularities. However, I would have thought that, if he had been aware that there was some documentation to back up what was said about the spending, he would not have been quite so stark in what he said.
