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 1396 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 18 November 2025
Ivan McKee
No; the funds that are raised from the levy, as the convener said, are a relatively small proportion of the total funds. The bulk of the lifting will be done by the Scottish Government’s capital budget.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 18 November 2025
Ivan McKee
It is important to say that we all agree that the remediation has to be carried out. We will not know the full scale of remediation that is required until all the assessments are done, so at this stage we would not be able to put a final end date on it. We are working to an assessment at this stage that is based on the best available information, and that is broadly in line with the assessment that has been made south of the border. The ability to predict future technical challenges in building construction is probably outside the powers of Scottish Government ministers. There might be such challenges in the future, and it would be for future Governments to deal with them.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 18 November 2025
Ivan McKee
That is about how Government budgets run. We have this conversation at other times about making sure that we use all the money that is available to meet the priorities of the people of Scotland. The idea that we would put that money in a biscuit tin and keep it there does not reflect the way that the finances work.
Looking at this at a macro level, it is understood that the total cost of the remediation will be far higher than the amount of money that is raised through the levy. By virtue of that fact alone, there is absolutely no doubt that everything that is raised through the levy will find its way towards remediation. Therefore, the mechanism by which you would do that hypothecation does not seem practical or necessary.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 18 November 2025
Ivan McKee
There is robust data on the number of completions, so that is understood, and there is categorisation of that vis-à-vis the exemptions that we are talking about.
Officials can give more detail on the total market, but the difference was the period of time over which the average was taken. We have used a certain number of years to average the market size. Homes for Scotland is using a different number of years to average, and that is why we are seeing that difference. The effect of that is that we say that new build is 0.6 per cent of the total market size. If we used Homes for Scotland’s numbers, the average would be a slightly higher number, but it would still be in that range. It does not make a material difference to the size of the percentage of the total cost or the total size of the housing market.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 18 November 2025
Ivan McKee
It is the same as the bill down south—
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 18 November 2025
Ivan McKee
It might do, but, as I have said, we do not have a crystal ball that tells us what building safety issues might or might not arise in the future. It would be up to future Governments and future Parliaments to take a view on that.
Did you want to comment, Hannah?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 18 November 2025
Ivan McKee
There are and will be a lot of unknowns until we get through this phase of the assessment, including where we would even put that clause. We have put forward data today about 12 to 15-year outcomes, but it is hard to pin that down exactly at this stage.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 18 November 2025
Ivan McKee
We always listen closely to what the sector has to say. We understand the cumulative impact of charges—of course we do—and we recognise that the sector has a crucial role to play in helping us resolve the housing challenges that we face. We will continue to work with the sector on that. Obviously, in a perfect world, we would not want to be doing this, but we need to.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 18 November 2025
Ivan McKee
I would say that we are conscious of the concerns that developers have. We engage extensively with the sector on such measures. As you rightly identified, the building safety levy is being applied right across the UK, so I do not think that that would be a reason for a developer choosing to build disproportionately fewer properties in Scotland than in the rest of the UK, where the levy is also being implemented.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 18 November 2025
Ivan McKee
That is absolutely correct. There is obviously a balance to be struck in relation to how we pursue our policy objectives. We must balance our policy objectives against the cost to those who will not be covered by the reliefs.
