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 1519 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Joe FitzPatrick
Eljamel started practising in Scotland in 1995, before this Parliament even existed, and a great many of the regulations around employment are still reserved. Once the Eljamel inquiry publishes its report, will you be liaising with your United Kingdom counterparts to ensure that those aspects are dealt with? We need to have confidence that the staff in Scotland and across the UK are competent to do the work that we put so much trust in them to do. Of course, we know that the overwhelming majority are competent, and that there is only a tiny number of cases in which they are not.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Joe FitzPatrick
You talked about speaking to the Government about how you can do these things better. Have you thought about speaking to the carers organisations and the third sector organisations about how you can improve? There are good examples of boards in which non-voting members feel that they are absolutely part of the decision-making process, but such examples are almost unique.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Joe FitzPatrick
I was not going to come in here, but you have said a couple of times something that will concern some of the most vulnerable patients in Scotland: trans patients. A couple of times, you have almost implied that women need to be protected from trans patients, so I just want to give you the opportunity to make it clear that, as well as protecting women’s rights, we should be protecting trans people’s rights.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Joe FitzPatrick
You said that you are speaking to the Women’s Rights Network, which takes a particular view in relation to excluding trans people. Are you also speaking to LGBTQ organisations, to ensure that you hear the lived experience of that very vulnerable group of people, particularly trans patients?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland
Meeting date: 3 February 2026
Joe FitzPatrick
I want to follow up on what has been said about the Eljamel situation. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of our surgeons and staff in the NHS are amazing and do a fantastic job. I acknowledge that the inquiry is on-going but I would raise two particular aspects that should be mentioned. First is the issue of the closing of ranks, which you have talked about, and which we probably all accept that we need to get better at dealing with. We need to ensure that the duty of candour that is in law now and the whistleblowing legislation are used to benefit patient safety.
The other aspect concerns the fact that Eljamel was performing outwith his competences. You say that you are not confident that the Eljamel situation could not happen again. Do you think that there could be a situation in which someone who is not qualified ends up doing surgery that they are not qualified to do?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Joe FitzPatrick
You talked earlier about the on-going evaluation. Did something specific trigger that evaluation? What can we expect from it?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Joe FitzPatrick
When you are doing the work to assess whether the risk has changed, do you look just at the tax base side of things or do you look, for instance, at the wider social contract? There is evidence that people are moving from the rest of the UK into Scotland because of the social contract and in spite of tax differences.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Administration of Scottish income tax 2024-25”
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Joe FitzPatrick
The witnesses have already covered the area that I will raise a bit, so I will tighten my questions. I want to talk about compliance risk. You have said that HMRC’s assessment is that Scotland’s compliance risk is similar to that for the UK overall, given the current levels of divergence. Is there a certain level of divergence at which the risk would change?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Joe FitzPatrick
As the convener said, I am going to cover preventative spend, but I also want to cover the mental health budget, so I will start there.
Cabinet secretary, given that the latest data that we have for mental health spending relates to 2023-24, are you able to give us a commitment that we will get more timely analysis of mental health spending patterns in the future?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 27 January 2026
Joe FitzPatrick
That is really helpful—thank you.
There is another area of the mental health budget that I am keen to explore a little. The mental health budgets have now been baselined to a degree; that feels like a good thing to do, but it makes our job a little bit more difficult in terms of being able to see where the money is. Is there a commitment to making sure that there is much transparency as possible, while recognising that baselining these kinds of budgets is a good thing?
