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 3801 contributions
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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of the Scottish Public Pensions Agency”
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Richard Leonard
Thank you for outlining a little bit of the history of the situation. At the start of your statement, you mentioned transparency, and it strikes me as being of interest that there is such a variation in the level of assessments made for the different occupational pension schemes in the public sector. For example, in your report, you highlight the fact that 85 per cent of retired police scheme members have received their assessment, but zero per cent of retired firefighters have received their assessment. Why is there such a big variation between two groups of workers in that way?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Delayed discharges: A symptom of the challenges facing health and social care” and “Community health and social care: Performance 2025”
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Richard Leonard
Before you go on, I want to go back to one point. You gave a fairly clear commitment that you would be working with Public Health Scotland to produce total cost data, and the recommendation was that that should be done within the next 12 months. Will you meet that timetable?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Delayed discharges: A symptom of the challenges facing health and social care” and “Community health and social care: Performance 2025”
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Richard Leonard
Okay—that is fine. I invite Joe FitzPatrick to put some questions to you.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of the Scottish Public Pensions Agency”
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Richard Leonard
I turn to Joe FitzPatrick to put some questions.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Delayed discharges: A symptom of the challenges facing health and social care” and “Community health and social care: Performance 2025”
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Richard Leonard
In response to one of Colin Beattie’s questions, you said that the answer is not more acute beds, but what about when health boards such as NHS Forth Valley close wards? It closed ward A11 of the Forth Valley royal hospital and has reduced the bed capacity. Do you have to sanction that, or is that a decision for the health board to take on its own? Do you have a general view about the contraction of capacity? Looking at the report, the lack of available beds is clearly highlighted as an issue.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Delayed discharges: A symptom of the challenges facing health and social care” and “Community health and social care: Performance 2025”
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Richard Leonard
I am afraid that the families whose relatives were in that ward would not see that as an exemplar. I will not go into any more detail, but let me assure you that that is not how they saw it—and, frankly, it is not how the staff at the hospital saw it either.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Delayed discharges: A symptom of the challenges facing health and social care” and “Community health and social care: Performance 2025”
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Richard Leonard
Picking up on that final question, one of the striking things in the briefing on community health and social care performance is exhibit 4 at the end, which talks about the impact of inequalities and the importance of reducing them. It points out clearly the huge gap in life expectancy, both male and female, between the most deprived and least deprived areas in Scotland, and it talks about the relationship between deprivation and the frequency in the use of day beds, premature mortality in areas of dense population and—this takes us back to the letter that Mr Simpson read out—the higher rates of unpaid care in some of the most deprived communities.
There are some fundamental social and economic structural issues out there, are there not? I acknowledge that it is perhaps not your sole responsibility to challenge and remedy them, but do you, in your position, take a view on those things? What is the Government doing to try to address the huge inequalities that exist?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of the Scottish Public Pensions Agency”
Meeting date: 18 February 2026
Richard Leonard
I turn to Graham Simpson to put some questions.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Decision on Taking Business in Private
Meeting date: 11 February 2026
Richard Leonard
Good morning. I welcome everyone to the sixth meeting in 2026 of the Public Audit Committee. The first item on our agenda is for members of the committee to decide whether to take agenda items 3, 4 and 5 in private. Do members agree to take those items in private?
Members indicated agreement.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Best Value in policing: Joint Best Value audit of policing in Scotland”
Meeting date: 11 February 2026
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much indeed for that introduction to the report. When I look at the key messages at the very start of the report, they give quite a positive picture. You use terminology such as “Financial management is strong” and “Governance arrangements are effective”, and you say:
“Policing in Scotland benefits from effective strategic leadership, with senior leaders working well together supported by open, constructive relationships.”
As a Public Audit Committee, we do not often read a report that has such uncritical conclusions and key messages. You might want to say a word about that.
However, I picked up that, when you spoke in the report about the strategic police plan, you said that the priorities and outcomes were not necessarily all that well defined. How do you reconcile those headline descriptions of how well things are going with some of the discoveries that you made when you looked in more detail at things such as the strategic police plan?
