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 936 contributions
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SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review
Meeting date: 20 February 2025
Ash Regan
I want to turn to accountability and scrutiny mechanisms. We are interested to know whether the scrutiny that you are receiving is robust and whether you feel that it is appropriate. Could you give us your view on how you are scrutinised, and whether you think that there are more effective ways in which that could be done?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review
Meeting date: 20 February 2025
Ash Regan
I, too, want to ask about the mechanisms around the accountability and scrutiny functions. In your written submission, you suggest—as you have done in your exchange with Richard Leonard—that your mechanisms are appropriate and robust. Annual reports feature as a main part of that scrutiny, certainly for the committees in the Parliament, and you suggest that there are ways in which that mechanism could be made more effective. Could you explain that?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review
Meeting date: 20 February 2025
Ash Regan
I will summarise what you have said. There should be increased frequency of your appearances in front of the corporate body and, possibly, in front of committees, although we all understand that there are capacity issues in relation to the Criminal Justice Committee, which is why, in the previous parliamentary session, there was the Justice Sub-committee on Policing, which provided extra capacity.
I want to pick up your point about the reports that you produce. Do you feel that you are not receiving any sort of scrutiny on a number of your reports?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review
Meeting date: 20 February 2025
Ash Regan
Different forms of accountability and scrutiny are interacting. We have the corporate body, the SPPA Committee and Audit Scotland. How do you think they are working together? Is there anything that could be done to improve that?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review
Meeting date: 20 February 2025
Ash Regan
Your organisation publishes a lot of data sets on performance, including key performance indicators against the functions that are set out in the enabling legislation. Not all the supported bodies are required to do that. Should all the supported bodies publish the same sets of information?
Meeting of the Parliament
Portfolio Question Time
Meeting date: 20 February 2025
Ash Regan
The programme for government prioritises eradicating child poverty, but the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reports that 26 per cent of children in Scotland still live in relative poverty. Although the Scottish child payment is crucial, we cannot merely react to poverty outcomes: we must change outcomes by breaking the cycle that traps so many families in poverty by going upstream to stop people falling into debt.
Education is critical in tackling the scourge of financial exploitation by empowering Scotland’s children with financial literacy from primary school age, so will the Government commit to supporting game-changing financial literacy initiatives, such as those that RedSTART Educate runs in my constituency, to break at its roots the cycle of generational child poverty?
Meeting of the Parliament
Portfolio Question Time
Meeting date: 20 February 2025
Ash Regan
To ask the Scottish Government what discussions the social justice secretary has had with ministerial colleagues regarding how it can improve financial literacy levels among children, in light of reports that it is a key driver of inequality, which affects attainment and perpetuates the cycle of generational poverty. (S6O-04341)
Meeting of the Parliament
Portfolio Question Time
Meeting date: 20 February 2025
Ash Regan
Almost one in three working women in Scotland are employed in the public sector—many in health and social care. The Government has a duty to ensure that all policies of publicly funded bodies uphold legal and regulatory protections. Will the Government make a clear statement that the provision of same-sex spaces for women is a legal obligation and that gender self-identification is not the law in Scotland?
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
The Promise (Third Oversight Board Report)
Meeting date: 19 February 2025
Ash Regan
The oversight board’s third report confirms that there have been systemic failures in child safeguarding, but I am afraid that I am not picking up a sense that there is any recognition of that or of the accountability that is needed from the Government in driving change forward.
In the light of the calls in petition PE1979 for an independent inquiry into the mishandling of child protection and the establishment of a national whistleblowing officer for education and children’s services, will the Government commit to ensuring that whistleblowers are properly protected and that public bodies are held accountable for safeguarding failures and not left to mark their own homework?
Meeting of the Parliament
Employer National Insurance Contributions
Meeting date: 18 February 2025
Ash Regan
I have listened to Labour members’ speeches all afternoon. Are they labouring under the apprehension, as Margaret Thatcher was, that the economy of a country is the same as a household budget? Perhaps I should send them an economics textbook so that they can brush up on economics.
