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 1300 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
First, regarding the underspend, we are confusing a number of different issues. The bulk of the underspend was due to the final phase of the winding down of European structural funds. That addresses that point.
We are now moving into the budget-setting process for next year and I can give an absolute guarantee that economic growth is central to the Government’s mission. It is one of the First Minister’s four priorities and we absolutely recognise the centrality of skills provision in that agenda to enable us to drive growth across the economy. That will absolutely be given its place in any discussion about the allocation of funds in the budget process.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
Exactly.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
Let us explore that issue, because it is important. Let us look at the health and social care budget, which involves the biggest transfer. When it comes to the health and social care environment, the whole thesis is that it is cheaper, more cost effective, better for the individual and better for outcomes for people to be moved through the system into social care. To some extent, the reason that that does not happen is that the funding is not there for that. If we look at the health and social care budget in the round, we can see that it is more cost effective to have that money in the social care environment than it is to have it in the health environment. In order to recognise that balance, the funding is in the same portfolio.
However, the reason for the transfer is that the delivery of social care takes place in the local government portfolio. Part of the issue is that, if we were to keep those aspects of spend completely separate, that would create restrictions on spending on social care, which would affect our ability to invest to the extent that we need to in order to free up beds in acute hospitals. That is a concrete example of the policy being in one place and the delivery being somewhere else, and the need for the relevant budgets to reflect that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
Yes—if we spread things out over 365 days, it represents about three days.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
That is what the policy is based on. Negotiations with each of the unions take place in that context. You need to reflect the fact that inflation will be higher in some years, and it will not necessarily be 3 per cent each year.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
The overall picture is that the cost of increased national insurance contributions to the Scottish public sector is about £700 million, and the amount of money received from the UK Government is about half of that. Money has been transferred to portfolios to cover those costs, including everything that the UK Government added in to support that—which was barely half of it—and additional funds that the Scottish Government has had to find to help with support for those costs.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
Yes, there was an increase of £246.8 million. That includes the annually managed expenditure provision for future national health service and teacher pension costs, which is obviously not available for day-to-day spending. At £141.9 million, AME is the biggest part of that figure. Under Transport Scotland, there is an extra £78.7 million for Scottish Rail Holdings, a non-departmental public body, for the lease costs of existing rolling stock—again, that has no impact on Scottish Government discretionary spending. There is a transfer of £24.1 million within the student loans budget line, which reflects updated estimates for student loan capital and capitalised interest requirements. That is another technical issue that does not have any impact on Scottish Government day-to-day spending.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
I will defer to officials on the technical aspects of that. Pensions are usually a complicated subject. They are affected by a range of factors.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
Indeed. Thank you for mentioning that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 11 November 2025
Ivan McKee
We are very clear on this. The way in which we traditionally do budgeting—we have been doing this stuff for a long time in the public sector—does not necessarily lend itself to an environment in which there is money moving between silos and to prevention and so on. I recognise that and I am happy to work with the committee on how we address it. Indeed, workstreams 5 and 6 are all about preventative budgeting and how we configure budgets.
