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 724 contributions
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Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
Meeting date: 4 February 2026
Jamie Hepburn
Okay. I have a question on the process that you have followed thus far. There have been 18 public meetings—I went along to one of them. Has there been an assessment of the feedback on those meetings?
I will be candid: I did not find the experience very satisfactory, and I do not think the attendees did either. That is not a criticism of those who came along to present, but there were breakout groups and I do not think that that was what the attendees expected. Has there been an assessment of how the members of the public who came along found the public meetings?
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
Meeting date: 4 February 2026
Jamie Hepburn
I suppose the other side of that is that, if you could not recruit, you would not be doing it.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
Meeting date: 4 February 2026
Jamie Hepburn
I am sorry, John—
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
Meeting date: 4 February 2026
Jamie Hepburn
It is year on year. That is useful to understand—again, we can draw out the information, so that is something that I may speak to my committee colleagues about. I just want to see whether it is a longer-term trend as well, but I do not know whether you can speak to that just now.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
Meeting date: 4 February 2026
Jamie Hepburn
I will do my best, convener, but they are on important issues that impact my constituency, so I am intrigued and interested to know the answers.
The first follows up on Pauline McNeill’s question. You will need to forgive me, but is your name pronounced “Mhairi” or “Vhairi”?
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
Meeting date: 4 February 2026
Jamie Hepburn
I am only asking whether there is scope. It is not that we have to rely on the Government to direct the board; the board could make the decision on its own.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
Meeting date: 4 February 2026
Jamie Hepburn
But could the board make a decision?
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
Meeting date: 4 February 2026
Jamie Hepburn
I accept that perspective. It would be useful for us to understand what people’s experience was, but that is a legitimate perspective.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
Meeting date: 4 February 2026
Jamie Hepburn
Of course.
Criminal Justice Committee [Draft]
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
Meeting date: 4 February 2026
Jamie Hepburn
I accept that and I recognise that there is no formal decision-making process. I concede that. The point was—and I am sympathetic to it—that the committee might want to ask questions in advance of a final decision. However, I recognise that it is for the board to decide that. I was really just trying to understand the process.
Looking at the process that you have undertaken—I have made this point directly in response to the consultation and I have raised it in debate in Parliament—I would be intrigued to understand the rationale that has been pursued. I recognise that it is no easy undertaking when you are looking across the country and considering the extent to which you are going to have to regionalise it. However, you are a national service. It is difficult to remove my own constituency experiences entirely from this, but this point will be true everywhere, I suppose. When you were presenting on a regional basis, the changes were not always clear. Changes in Glasgow, for example, could impact my constituency, but they were not presented together, which I found a little unsatisfactory. Can you reassure me that, despite it being presented that way, there is some form of cross-border assessment, for want of a better term, given that, strictly speaking, there is no border or boundary in terms of the service?
