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 1221 contributions
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Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
Daniel Johnson
Do any of the other witnesses want to make any comments about the need for clarity on any of the assumptions or about things that are implied but need to be made explicit in the plan? I do not see any indication that anyone wants to come in.
I have a final catch-all question. We have all been asking questions with the view that tackling climate change is imperative, so we must reduce our emissions—if for no other reason than our economy will need to compete in a world in which other countries are already reducing their emissions and aiming for a carbon-neutral world. However, there are people who will argue that we are simply adding costs to our economy and that it is an error to be pursuing climate targets. Are we all of the view that we must seek to reduce our emissions and achieve a carbon-neutral economy? Do we all agree that that is imperative for the Scottish economy?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
Daniel Johnson
But we need a plan.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
Daniel Johnson
I have a brief supplementary. On that point, is there anywhere in the world where alternative technologies for cracking—I take this as an example; there are other energy-intensive technologies—are priced competitively with gas-based cracking technology? Is it a feasible scenario to replace that with alternative technologies, or is that not the current state of the art? If it is not, how far away are we from such a scenario?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
Daniel Johnson
Thank you for that. What the plan will look like for business and industry is the very specific lens through which we hope to look at it. I know that colleagues will wish to follow up on the investment and financing aspects.
I will bring in Professor Karen Turner on the same point. Have we drilled down in sufficient detail? Is this actually a plan, or is it still a set of ambitions on emissions reduction?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
Daniel Johnson
Thanks very much. I apologise to members for spending longer on my questions than I intended. I bring in the deputy convener, Michelle Thomson.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
Daniel Johnson
Indeed. With an eye on the time and given that we have been asking questions for 90 minutes, I suggest that we take a five-minute recess and recommence just after 10 past.
11:06 Meeting suspended.11:10 On resuming—
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
Daniel Johnson
I would like to ask a few final questions. I have a couple of technical points that I will direct to Professor de Leeuw. On a number of occasions, you have made the point that we need to understand the underlying assumptions, principally about the costs, but I wonder whether that point also relates to the emission pathways. The advice from the Climate Change Committee suggests that we need balanced pathways and for those pathways to be broken down by sector, and the CCP takes a similar approach, but the differences between the pathways that the Climate Change Committee has set out and the ones that are set out in the CCP are not entirely clear. Is that another area in which we need to understand the underlying assumptions that the Scottish Government has made in order to understand the differentials? Is that a fair point to highlight?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
Daniel Johnson
In what has been published, is there sufficient additional clarity on the how?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
Daniel Johnson
But my question is whether that is happening anywhere in the world.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Draft Climate Change Plan
Meeting date: 7 January 2026
Daniel Johnson
I do not know who might be best placed to answer this. The cost is one element, but there is also a ceiling on the temperature to which electrical sources can heat things. That might suffice for some processes such as distillation, but it certainly would not for others such as cement or concrete manufacture or for other very high-heat applications.
We might not have an industry-specific representative on the panel, but does any of our witnesses have any insight on that? Do we need more focused research and development on how we can replace gas as a high-heat energy source?
