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 1452 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Spending Review
Meeting date: 24 February 2026
Liz Smith
::Off the back of the question that Mr Mason asked Mirren Kelly and Jack Gillespie, I would like to explore the IJB issue. Mr Mason pointed out that IJBs are, effectively, third bodies that are involved in the decision-making process—you have local government, the health board and the IJB. Certainly in my part of the country, there has been a lot of criticism of IJBs. Is the IJB structure the most effective way to deliver services, or should we look at doing something else?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Spending Review
Meeting date: 24 February 2026
Liz Smith
::Go on. That is why I asked the question.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Spending Review
Meeting date: 24 February 2026
Liz Smith
::Given that local government has been deprioritised—as Mirren Kelly rightly set out—to what extent have discussions taken place inside COSLA about the opportunity costs, given the extensive demands that you have mentioned for health and social care? You will have to make cuts.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Spending Review
Meeting date: 24 February 2026
Liz Smith
::Is there better accountability for decision making with IJBs than there was before they were set up?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Spending Review
Meeting date: 24 February 2026
Liz Smith
::Is that a leadership thing?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 24 February 2026
Liz Smith
::I am generally happy with the instruments, minister. I have just one question. The policy note intimates that the instrument will not have much impact on local government, but four Scottish local authorities have their own quarries so they are taxed in a separate way. At the time, did any of the local government officers express any concern about this?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
VAT and Independent Schools
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Liz Smith
Because they get the VAT back.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
VAT and Independent Schools
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Liz Smith
So, the concern about the difficulties that ASN pupils potentially face is not in that third of your schools but is in the other two thirds that you look after.
I have had representations from three different parents from across Perthshire, one of whom gave me permission to say that they have a severely dyslexic child who got considerable specialist one-to-one help thanks to the independent school that he was attending but is no longer able to go to that school because of the VAT. He has gone to a state school, and his parents said—they would want me to say this—that, despite the best efforts of the staff in that school, there is not the same specialist provision. That youngster is suffering both academically and socially, and the parents are at their wits’ end about what to do. Is the fact that people are facing financial constraints coming back to SCIS quite a bit?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
VAT and Independent Schools
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Liz Smith
I think that those parents would agree with that. They said that the local authority had been reasonably supportive but simply did not have the capacity to look after those youngsters and meet their needs. I go back to the comments that Mr Rennie made—it is about ensuring that we can provide for all those youngsters without disruption.
Let me turn to the issue of bursary support. I know that that is very complex, as we had various discussions about that around the committee table earlier. Is it the case that, of those schools that offer substantial bursary support, the number of schools that offer 100 per cent bursaries is starting to decrease? Is that correct? You mentioned it, Mr O’Neill.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
VAT and Independent Schools
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Liz Smith
That was immensely helpful. It is very important to get across that diversity, because I think that there is sometimes a perception out there that these schools are nothing to do with SCIS, yet they are.
The level of additional support needs is increasing across the board, but is there any indication, within the specialist schools that SCIS looks after, of any financial impact on pupils who might like to go to those schools?
