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 2072 contributions
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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jamie Greene
We are grateful to you for coming to speak to us as we undertake our work on this important issue.
I will backtrack for a second just to get my head round where you believe that you fit into the equation, because—I will check the Official Report on this—I believe that you said that, as an independent adviser, it is your job to advise people, but it is up to them to deliver; you are in an advisory position, and other people need to pull their weight and do their bit for all of this to work. I understand that. However, on the other hand, you are the chair of The Promise Scotland, and the public would expect that to come with a level of accountability and responsibility for the overall delivery of the Promise. Is there a conflict? You said that you are simply there to advise people to get on with the job, when actually you are in charge of the job.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jamie Greene
It is interesting that you say that the three key tenets of your role as chair of The Promise Scotland are the strategy for the Promise, the delivery of the Promise and the relationships. Is that correct? Is that your understanding of it?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jamie Greene
Indeed. Mr Simpson has some questions.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jamie Greene
I have some supplementary questions in the short time that we have left.
While I am grateful for your responses thus far during this evidence session—and I cannot speak on behalf of the whole committee—I feel that there is a general sense of frustration that we do not seem to be getting to the bottom of the question of whose job it is to deliver the Promise.
Perhaps we just need to be a bit more frank with each other. If it is not your job as chair, if it is not the job of the chair of the Oversight Board and if it is not the job of a director general in some Scottish Government department, who is responsible for producing a plan, assigning people to deliver the plan and assigning the budget that is necessary for that plan to succeed?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jamie Greene
So you produced that document. I do not know what you are waving at me.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jamie Greene
It sounds to me that, while you can produce documents with advice, you can strategise and you can come up with ideas and tell people what they ought to be doing, ultimately, with the best will in the world, you cannot make them do anything. If they fail to deliver—in some areas, we clearly have evidence of failure to deliver what is necessary to make the Promise happen—that is outside your control. Do you feel that you are perhaps unfairly taking the flak for the lack of progress on the Promise?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jamie Greene
Unless there are any other questions from members, we will pause there. Thank you for coming in this morning to give evidence and add to our evidence gathering on the issue.
We will have a short suspension to allow for a change of witnesses as we move on to the next agenda item.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of Historic Environment Scotland”
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Jamie Greene
Agenda item 2 is consideration of the Auditor General for Scotland’s section 22 report into the 2024-25 audit of Historic Environment Scotland.
I welcome our witnesses. Stephen Boyle is the Auditor General for Scotland and Lisa Duthie and Carole Grant are both audit directors at Audit Scotland.
Before members get into their lines of questioning, I invite the Auditor General to make a short opening statement on his report.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of Historic Environment Scotland”
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Jamie Greene
In your professional opinion, was the move from green to amber to red a result of a lack of action or response to issues that the sponsorship team flagged? Or was it perhaps a result of issues within the sponsorship division in relation to the way in which it oversees or governs the body? Or perhaps the blame lies in both lobbies.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Section 22 Report: “The 2024/25 audit of Historic Environment Scotland”
Meeting date: 14 January 2026
Jamie Greene
Just for the record, I can reassure committee members that agenda item 5, which we will take in private, will be looking at next steps on how we may garner more information from either Historic Environment Scotland or the Scottish Government and the opportunities that are open to us to do so. We will discuss those later in the meeting, in particular around some of the areas that Mr Simpson has asked Audit Scotland about. Obviously, we will let you know if there is anything of interest, Auditor General.
I now invite Joe FitzPatrick to ask some questions.
