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 3406 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
John Mason
I accept that the situation is improving, which is positive.
With regard to the visits that take place—including pre-placement visits, although you explained that a pre-placement visit may not be possible—who carries them out? Are they always carried out by the placing authority? Could Devon County Council, say, ask Falkirk Council to do a visit on its behalf?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
John Mason
To follow on from previous questions, I have one or two points arising from the policy note. Willie Rennie asked about the differences in how a child from Scotland and a child from England would be looked after or treated. I was struck by the second page of the policy note, which states:
“The Scottish Government also understands that children are sometimes placed without education provision having been agreed, leading to children being without education for prolonged periods.”
That sounds very concerning to me. Is that the type of issue that we are talking about? For a Scottish child, that would not happen, because the local authority would know that they needed education, but it could happen for a child from elsewhere. Is that the issue?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
John Mason
The policy note mentions that placements might be in “remote parts of Scotland”, but for someone who is in the Isle of Wight or somewhere like that, Glasgow is remote, is it not? Anywhere in Scotland could be remote from that point of view.
The six-weekly visit seems to be a minimum. The policy note refers to situations
“Where a six weekly visit is not possible”,
and elsewhere it says that six-weekly visits should be made
“insofar as reasonably practicable”.
That seems quite a lot like a get-out. If a child is with an unknown family in an unknown town, six weeks is quite a long period in terms of finding out how they are getting on. Can you give us any reassurance on that? Would phone calls normally be made as well? If a six-weekly visit is not “practicable”, the child could be in a bad situation for quite a while.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
John Mason
Okay. So, the child will be more likely to get the provision that they should be getting.
You and others have already mentioned the question of whether it is in the child’s best interests to be placed in Scotland. Can you expand on what that means? If a child is from, say, Devon, I could understand that they might want to be in Cornwall, to be a bit further away from their local environment, but Scotland—even Glasgow or Edinburgh—would be quite remote from their area.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
John Mason
So, that means that, in the future, every child, wherever they are from, will be entitled to exactly the same education provision.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
John Mason
Is one of the reasons simply that the authorities cannot find a place in England so they dump the child in Scotland?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 6 January 2026
John Mason
I will follow up on that point, because that was one of my questions. My opinion is that the lobbying register is a complete waste of money. The information comes out months afterwards and serves, in my opinion, no value whatsoever. I do not know whether we could write to the appropriate committee and ask it to look at post-legislative scrutiny on that. I do not know whether it has done that. Are you aware, Mr Carlaw, whether it has done that?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 6 January 2026
John Mason
The Government’s intends to reduce staff, among civil servants and so on, by about 0.5 per cent across the board. Is the corporate body considering whether that should be happening for the Parliament and for MSP staff?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 6 January 2026
John Mason
It was just an idea. I was not thinking of having it instead of the shop; I was thinking of having it in addition, because quite a lot of tourists who do not come into the Parliament might be interested. Some of the shop’s products are excellent. I have bought a number of the scarves over the years, and people really like them.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 6 January 2026
John Mason
We have heard about MSP staff and the fact that the take-up is 93 per cent on average. However, the figures vary a lot. For example, I looked at members of this committee and two of them used only 70 per cent—or £103,000 out of a limit of £147,000—of their staff allowance in 2023-24.
It seems clear that some MSPs can cope with a lot less expenditure on staff than others. We had the big increase, which Mr Carlaw referred to earlier, at the beginning of this session. Is anyone measuring whether MSPs are achieving more with that big increase? How is it that one MSP can have three full-time staff, and that can be absolutely satisfactory, but others need to have more? Are we simply comparing with Westminster, as Mr Hoy suggested, or are we comparing with some kind of actual reality?
