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 1441 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 September 2025
Miles Briggs
It is not good morning but good afternoon—and probably good evening for Maria Galli. I thank the witnesses for joining us.
I will ask a couple of questions about the proposed register of foster carers, which Claire Burns has touched on already. By and large, there has been support for the proposal, but are there any issues with it that the witnesses want to outline to the committee?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 September 2025
Miles Briggs
That was very helpful. Maria, did you want to come in on any of that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 September 2025
Miles Briggs
Finally, the Promise includes a national lifelong advocacy for care-experienced people. Having spoken to older care-experienced constituents of mine, I am not sure where advocacy support for them will come from, because it does not currently exist. Indeed, I do not think that many people necessarily know about that potential opportunity.
I know that your organisations work predominantly with children and young people, but if we are going to have this wide definition of national lifelong advocacy, where will the support come from? Will it have to be established, given that most services that I know of are over capacity?
We have also discussed local government and changes to CSO. Do you have any views on that? Coming back to Ms Burns’s point, I wonder what that means when it comes to considering and getting ahead of those issues before legislation is passed.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Schools (Residential Outdoor Education) (Scotland) Bill
Meeting date: 10 September 2025
Miles Briggs
You have outlined the fact that £5 million to £6 million could be provided for a non-legislative approach to the bill’s aims through a pilot, but you have not worked with Liz Smith on costings for the bill that is in front of the Parliament and that the Parliament has supported. I find it very strange that that work is being done behind the scenes and that the costing work has not been done with Liz Smith.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Schools (Residential Outdoor Education) (Scotland) Bill
Meeting date: 10 September 2025
Miles Briggs
My final question is for the minister. What message would it send out if the bill were to fall, not only about the democratic will of Parliament but to the outdoor education community, which has put a lot of hard work into the bill? There is a huge amount of support and excitement out there for the bill. What message does it send if the Government allows the bill to fall in this manner?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Schools (Residential Outdoor Education) (Scotland) Bill
Meeting date: 10 September 2025
Miles Briggs
I am asking whether the team or the minister have asked the City of Edinburgh Council or Aberdeenshire Council for the costings that they put in place and about the negotiations with the unions, given that, basically, the policy is operational in those council areas.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 September 2025
Miles Briggs
We have privately discussed some of my concerns in recent times about the lack of foster carers who are coming forward, specifically here in the City of Edinburgh Council area. Have concerns around whether there might be unintended consequences of the bill, including people not coming forward, been addressed? Are there concerns about whether the provisions would mean that local authorities would have to retain their registers? What value would a national register represent?
Fiona Duncan, you outlined earlier the need for the bill to reduce bureaucracy and not just add more layers. Will you outline some of those concerns, especially in relation to where we are currently with the bill?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 September 2025
Miles Briggs
Children 1st circulated a thorough briefing and highlighted some of the missed opportunities to strengthen the legislation. It pointed specifically towards family group decision making and improving the consistency of financial support for kinship carers. It seems that kinship carers have been left out of the bill. I do not know whether the Government is looking, as we have touched on, at another bill that might include them in the future, but I thought that that was a stark missed opportunity, as Children 1st has highlighted. What are your views on that at this stage of the bill, and on potential amendments at stage 2?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Schools (Residential Outdoor Education) (Scotland) Bill
Meeting date: 10 September 2025
Miles Briggs
If I am hearing you correctly, detailed work has been undertaken on projected costs. Liz Smith has suggested amending the bill to target provision at those in primary 6 and 7. Are you telling the committee that the Government has costed that and that you have potential projections? Have you spoken to councils such as my own, in Edinburgh, which already has the policy in place? I do not think that we need a pilot; we can just find out what the City of Edinburgh Council, as one of Scotland’s largest councils, is spending on delivering outdoor education for our young people. How detailed has the work been? Why have the costings not been shared with Liz Smith and the committee?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 10 September 2025
Miles Briggs
Good morning to the witnesses, and thank you for joining us today.
I will touch on a couple of issues, the first of which is the register of foster carers. A number of respondents to the call for views were supportive of a register in principle but felt that further detail was required on how it would work in practice. We have touched on this already, but a lot of what is in the bill will be set out in regulations at a later date. What is the potential impact of having the details set out in guidance, and how might the proposals in the bill be improved? Is there anything specific that you want to highlight to the committee in that regard?
I will come on to a couple of other questions after that.
