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 3061 contributions
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Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Gillian Martin
You can argue back and forth with me, Mr Lumsden. I am telling you what the Scottish cluster has told me, which is that it wants that £80 million to be deployed at the point at which it needs it.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Gillian Martin
I have told you that already—I thought that that might have been breaking news. I am glad that you got that information. That will obviously have an impact on when we produce the climate change plan, which is now prescribed in statute.
We had a very good first official meeting with Emma Pinchbeck, who is the new chief executive officer of the Climate Change Committee, in December—in the week before recess, I think. We discussed the CCC’s approach to the advice that it will give us and our approach to our climate change plan. I am looking forward to getting the CCC’s advice. I am under no illusions with regard to how much it is pulling out all the stops in order to get that advice to us in May.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Gillian Martin
I will have to write to the committee with that detail. We are doing that work now, because we found out the new date only last Thursday. Obviously, the committee knows that that indication has come. I will write to the committee once we have worked all that out.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Gillian Martin
That is what we are working on.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Gillian Martin
We will do that as quickly as we possibly can.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Gillian Martin
There are a number of things there. I will talk about what the hubs have done with the funding that they have had to date to give you an idea of the sort of thing that they are doing. They hold events and workshops to reach people and support community groups to take action. The hubs have provided small grants to community projects. They bring new groups into the climate conversation and support groups to apply for wider funding. The core funding helps with the establishment of the climate hubs and their operations, and they provide knock-on support for community groups. People could set up a group in a small community to do more and then apply for funding that might be available in other areas.
I hope that that answers your question, but I can give you a little more detail if you want. The hubs’ primary focus is climate action, which encompasses areas such as energy, transport and waste, but they are also very community based, and enable and empower people to make decisions in their communities about the right actions to take. That advice capacity is very important, because it can lead to community groups being able to access funding. The first tranche of the just transition fund had a participatory budgeting aspect, which you will know well. You can imagine that a climate action hub would be able to point a community in the direction of applying for that or another tranche of funding. There are 24 climate action hubs across Scotland, which means that there is national coverage. The knock-on effect that they will have on smaller climate groups and community groups will be pretty significant.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Gillian Martin
I think that there is an uplift.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Gillian Martin
I am looking at the figures, and according to them, I see an uplift of 10 per cent. However, I will check that and come back to you.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Gillian Martin
Yes. Again, it is spread across some of the schemes that I have outlined to you.
Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 14 January 2025
Gillian Martin
Your feedback on that would be helpful, because we want to go further. Feedback from the committee on the detail that is in what we have produced would be really helpful for us as we develop the approach further. I hope that Mark Ruskell agrees that it is better than it was five years ago, when there was not that level of detail. We are working hard to give the level of detail associated with the budget spend. The pilot and the work that has been done this year are an indication of that, but we are not there yet.
