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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 874 contributions
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
Did you access any of the Scottish Enterprise money after the February decision to look at plant consolidation? Was the application to access Scottish Enterprise funding made prior to the February decision, or did any of it happen subsequent to the decision in February?
10:15Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 26 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
You painted a picture of the investment that has been made in Scarborough and in Larbert. Can you provide a timeline of when the key decisions were made? That investment implies that you have been building capacity in Scarborough for some time.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
I am interested in understanding the scope of your representation on site. What is the breakdown of the areas that the two unions represent?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
Derek, you raised points about China and considerations under the Subsidy Control Act 2022. My understanding is that you can take into consideration social value and you can also, as you say, provide direct awards. You can also treat bids from non-treaty countries differently from bids from treaty countries, which China is not. I think that we all know the importance of encouraging people on to public transport and that transport should be seen as being absolutely critical to the economy. Could or should more conditionality have been placed on the grants provided by Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Government? Do you share my understanding of what the 2022 act might allow us to do going forward?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
The second suggestion is the one that you alluded to. What we need, in part, is a change in the procurement approach. Is there a possibility that, rather than only changing the narration of what is going on in procurement—which is what the report would do—there could be a change in the structure of the procurement that is undertaken by local authorities and other public bodies? The structure could require them to do some initial work to explain their procurement requirements, either for particular procurement exercises or more generally, and it could require them, in their work on how bids are assessed, to think in particular about social value, as that is a permitted reason for granting and awarding contracts, over and above simple financial value.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
I just wanted to understand that. I will ask about two broad issues. First, how did we get here and, secondly, what can be done? I will delve into the points that Derek Thomson brought up around the Subsidy Control Act 2022 and the art of the possible. On how we got here, we have some numbers in front of us. It basically looks like the business has struggled to recover to pre-pandemic volumes. The pre-pandemic volume of buses was around 1,200 a year, and the business has been unable to recover to that level. Is that the correct assessment, or are there other factors that we should be aware of and be looking at?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
On that, I am looking at the head count numbers and the balance between production and selling and administration. Compared with pre-pandemic levels, production head count is lower, but selling and admin are considerably higher. Is there a question here about the focus of the business? Is it focusing more on the administrative side of things as opposed to the production side, or is that a red herring? I apologise if I am asking daft laddie questions.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
I will ask a question that I have asked in private. The last thing that you need is politicians describing the situation—you need politicians to do things. There are things for the UK Government to do and there are things for the Scottish Government to do. Are there things that MSPs could be doing individually to support your efforts to try either to win contracts or find solutions? What are the asks that you would make of us as MSPs?
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
That would be great.
Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
I guess that I am saying that we should update existing guidance or legislation. I am not saying that it should be replaced; I am saying only that it should be updated.
I also wonder whether the bill could update the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, as has already been alluded to. When we talk to community organisations, we sense that there is a feeling that, despite the mechanism in that act, public authorities do not necessarily help them to make their bids, let alone local authorities and other public bodies such as health boards baking into their service design the possibility of the 2015 act—for example, its community asset transfer powers—being used in relation to running parts of their public service delivery.
Could there be an update to the 2015 act to create obligations to facilitate and enable such bids and to consider the provisions of the act and community wealth building as part of public service design and implementation?