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 3747 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Group-based Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Meeting date: 25 February 2026
Douglas Ross
I will come to you, Mr Naylor. Is the inspectorate partly responsible? You are now part of this review but, prior to that, the inspectorate was there to give reassurance to us as elected members and to the wider public that there is a body that is checking up on others. Did the inspectorate miss instances of networking or grooming gangs?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Group-based Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Meeting date: 25 February 2026
Douglas Ross
Mr Naylor, I was looking at the three phases of work on the review. At what point do survivors feature in that, or is that aspect being covered by Police Scotland and the other groups and therefore you are just looking at the bodies?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Group-based Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Meeting date: 25 February 2026
Douglas Ross
I will ask about document retention. DCC Smith spoke about there being no time bar against coming forward to Police Scotland, but some people may have come forward previously and not got the outcome that they expected at the time. Although things have changed since then, if someone goes to a local police station and says, “I reported this 30 years ago and I don’t think that it was handled correctly,” how confident are you that the relevant documents will be available and accessible?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Group-based Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Meeting date: 25 February 2026
Douglas Ross
Much of that is in paper form. You know where the paperwork is, and it is currently being digitised—is that correct?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Group-based Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Meeting date: 25 February 2026
Douglas Ross
I suppose that that would be proving a negative, as you suggested earlier, but there may be gaps that arise that look strange.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Group-based Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Meeting date: 25 February 2026
Douglas Ross
Paul O’Kane is joining us remotely.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Group-based Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Meeting date: 25 February 2026
Douglas Ross
Before I move on, you have made it clear that you are staunchly independent of the Government. So that you can get your response on the record, I put it to you that there are some concerns that the inspectorate in Scotland is too close to the Government, because you share buildings with them, for example. How do you respond to that? I hope that you can provide some reassurance to people who are watching and following our proceedings.
09:45
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Group-based Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Meeting date: 25 February 2026
Douglas Ross
You have suggested that things have not been investigated appropriately in the past as they would be now. I will not go into the specifics of the case, but I have raised a fairly recent case with you—indeed, it concluded in the court only in the past few weeks; it is not a historical case—in which errors have been made that we have to look at. Although the incidents may go back many years, it is a recent case and there are recent victims who I believe, from what I know about the case, have suffered as a result of the police investigation, which could have and should have been better. Would the force accept that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Group-based Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Meeting date: 25 February 2026
Douglas Ross
How short of resources are you?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Group-based Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
Meeting date: 25 February 2026
Douglas Ross
Initial child social work assessment meetings in 2023-24, which is just in the past couple of years, suggested that there were 13 cases of organised child sexual abuse and exploitation across Scotland, with no cases in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. As an inspectorate body, are you confident in that figure of 13 cases and that big cities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee had no cases?
