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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 2378 contributions
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Willie Coffey
Is there a wee bit of work to be done in illustrating to some authorities what transformation looks like and what it means? Is there an issue there? Is that one of the barriers?
10:15Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Willie Coffey
Okay, great. My other question is an interesting one. It comes from what the chief executive of Clackmannanshire Council, Nikki Bridle, said last week. I had better use her words. She said that, at the same time as councils are
“transforming and reforming, our auditors ... need to be in the same space”,
and that, in terms of evaluating new and complex models,
“some of the traditional skill sets might not be as relevant”.—[Official Report, Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, 9 September 2025; c 44.]
I had to use the exact words—I hope you do not mind. I would be interested in your response to that comment.
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Willie Coffey
Do the councils always agree with your recommendations?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Willie Coffey
Good morning. I want to ask about the community dimension of the transformation of local government services. Andrew Burns, you mentioned the five themes of vision, planning, governance, collaboration and innovation. How far do councils reach out to communities to get their participation in transforming local government services?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Willie Coffey
Have we seen enough of that early engagement across the board? For example, the committee has seen great work in North Ayrshire on community wealth building, where the early participation of communities that Andrew Burns talked about is really paying dividends. As I understand it, great stuff is going on in Fife as well, which I think is transformative. Are you seeing enough of that across the board to push the agenda a bit faster?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 16 September 2025
Willie Coffey
All councils have an internal audit function throughout each council. For many years, when I was on the Public Audit Committee, we focused on the duties and roles of internal audit compared with external audit. Should any council’s internal audit function come up with the same ideas and proposals that are suggested in the Accounts Commission’s reports? Why should we need another layer that, in effect, says the same thing?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Willie Coffey
Cabinet secretary, I recently heard of a case in East Ayrshire in which a local smaller supplier bid for a particular contract but lost out to a bigger supplier that could provide a much lower price, despite all the local criteria and so on being in favour of the smaller supplier.
Do you think that the boundaries are clear enough for councils to consider bids from and offer contracts to local smaller suppliers that usually—inevitably—offer a higher price? Some councils maybe feel compelled to opt for the lower price to satisfy procurement guidelines, but there are criteria in there that would allow them to vary that, should they so choose. Do you think that that whole area is clear enough, or does it need to be tidied up in any way?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Willie Coffey
The convener asked a question about resourcing. Did you mention a figure? Has any money been allocated to authorities to give them a kick-start and help them to develop the plans by giving them a little bit of resource to put behind that?
Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Willie Coffey
Good morning. That leads us nicely into the wider issue of transformational change that the Accounts Commission, Audit Scotland and others have been talking about for many years. I want to give colleagues an opportunity to share a couple of examples from each of their local authorities with the committee about what transformational change means to them. What have you achieved so far that you could fairly describe as transformational change? How do you see it developing in the future? Mr Burr, I will, again, start with you, as you are sitting in front of us.
11:30Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 9 September 2025
Willie Coffey
Thanks, Thomas. Those were comprehensive answers from everybody.