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 1044 contributions
Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 18 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
Murdo Fraser is absolutely right. Does that situation not also stand in contrast with the attacks on our communications infrastructure in the North Sea, and is it not therefore absolutely critical that the UK Government has stepped in to provide that £2.5 million funding?
Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 18 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
I think that we are not taking our own defence seriously by not considering what we need to do in terms of restocking our munitions. My point is highlighted by the fact that treating the submarine welding facility as a munitions project is false. Submarines are not munitions.
The issue is not just about Ukraine—it is about the rest of the world. Look at the developments in the South China Sea, where China is increasingly testing internationally recognised boundaries. More recently, the situation in Iran is of grave concern. All that requires us to reflect on our defences and our defence requirements.
The issue is not just about traditional and orthodox military threats. In the past two years, the UK has received 90,000 cyberattacks from foreign actors, almost 90 of which have been of national significance. That is why the UK Government has brought forward the strategic defence review, with a commitment of a spending increase to 2.7 per cent of GDP, and that is why the defence industry in Scotland needs our support and our investment across every area. We do not want to split the sector neatly between reserved and devolved areas. That is explicit in the strategic defence review. The whole-society approach and, critically, the mobilisation of our industrial base will require devolved levers to be pulled.
To make a brief point on the Green amendment and the point about human rights checks, these things are not incompatible. If we want to increase our defence spending and support our allies, we need to enhance our human rights checks, because it is critical that we understand where our spending and arms are going and how those arms are being used. Those things are not incompatible. We cannot support the Green amendment nor the SNP amendment because, far from diversifying away from defence—
Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 18 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?
Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 18 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
Would the cabinet secretary care to quote those figures since 2016 and acknowledge whether they are higher or lower for Scotland compared with the UK for that time period?
Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 18 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
Lorna Slater says that we should be supporting Ukraine. Does that include supplying munitions to that country? Therefore, should we be supporting the manufacturing of munitions on that basis?
Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 18 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
We need to lower the temperature a bit. As members know, I always like to strike a consensual tone, so I thank the Government and the Conservatives for providing arguments that I can agree with.
I agree with the Conservatives that the Scottish Government suddenly furnishing us with the figure of £1 billion of waste a year is somewhat striking, in relation to both the quantum and the fact that it has taken the Government 18 years to come forward with that. In turn, I agree with the Government that it is somewhat ironic for the Conservatives to present such a miraculous plan. I note that the savings are not added up in the Conservatives’ documentation, so we do not know whether their sums add up at all.
When did we last hear about a 19p basic tax rate? That is right—it was in the mini-budget from Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. With straight faces, the Scottish Conservatives are coming to the chamber with exactly the same uncosted tax cuts as were proposed by the UK Conservative Government that led to the calamity of increased mortgage bills, a run on the pound and a run on the cost of UK borrowing. That is simply not credible.
Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 18 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
—we need to invest in it.
I move amendment S6M-17981.1, to insert at end:
“; welcomes the confirmation from the UK Government that it will provide the funding for the welding skills centre so that the project does not collapse; notes the contradiction in the Scottish Government’s policy, as the publicly owned Ferguson Marine shipyard is providing steel fabrication work for Type 26 frigates, and believes that this haphazard and misjudged policy is holding back the creation of jobs and economic growth in Scotland.”
16:20Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 18 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
Social Security Scotland accounts for 3,000 of the head-count increase, which is less than a third. The total head-count increase is between 8,000 and 9,000, and about a third of that is from Social Security Scotland, so that is not an adequate answer.
This comes at a time when we have £6.7 billion-worth of waste from things such as ferries and scrapped deposit return schemes and when the Scottish Government seems to seek to reheat the arguments for full fiscal autonomy, with the loss of the 20 per cent premium that we gain through the Barnett formula.
Ultimately, there is a lack of engagement with the economic performance gap, which is dismissed as a technicality. It is not a technicality. The performance gap boils down to a difference in the earnings of everyday Scots; it is about tax receipts.
It is instructive that the cabinet secretary could not answer my question about the increase in GDP per head since 2016—it is 4.4 per cent for the UK and 2.6 per cent for Scotland. That date is important because 2016 is the year against which fiscal devolution is benchmarked; it dictates how much money we have to spend. The fact that the cabinet secretary could not answer that question and does not understand its relevance tells us everything that we need to know about the Scottish Government’s incompetence when it comes to public finances and the economy.
Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 18 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
I am very happy to do so, but it will need to be brief.
Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: 18 June 2025
Daniel Johnson
Although we might disagree on much, does the minister agree that this is not about shrinking the state, and that reform must be about freeing up people for front-line public service delivery?