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 1766 contributions
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Public Audit Committee
“Fiscal sustainability and public reform in Scotland”
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Jamie Greene
The logic, permanent secretary, is the deficit that exists.
Public Audit Committee
“Fiscal sustainability and public reform in Scotland”
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Jamie Greene
The problem is that they are in-year cuts. Portfolios that are expecting a certain amount of money to perform their functions and meet their objectives are discovering, through spending reviews, either that capital investment projects are being halted or paused, or that there are massive revisions to their budgets.
Exhibit 4 on page 14 of the report has some prime examples of the portfolios that were losing out over the financial years 2022-23 and 2023-24 as a result of in-year changes. This goes back to Ms Stafford’s point about the Government’s priorities. I imagine that one of the key pillars concerned economic growth and finding other ways to generate funding for public services that do not involve tax increases and borrowing.
Looking at the losers in the scenario presented by the table, we see that enterprise, trade and investment, the Scottish Funding Council, learning and energy efficiency and decarbonisation are all receiving funding decreases as a result of that objective of balancing the books. At the same time, that money is being shifted to a massively rising health and social care budget, local government pay awards and pensions. The public are clearly not seeing the immediate benefit of those, but they are seeing the immediate effect of the cuts to those services. In what way is that helping to meet the Government’s key pillars and objectives?
Public Audit Committee
“Fiscal sustainability and public reform in Scotland”
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Jamie Greene
Good morning. Permanent secretary, after your opening comments, when asked if you accepted the key messages, findings and recommendations of the Audit Scotland report, I believe that you said that you did, in their entirety. Is that correct?
10:45Public Audit Committee
“Fiscal sustainability and public reform in Scotland”
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Jamie Greene
We look forward to seeing them. Thank you.
Public Audit Committee
“Fiscal sustainability and public reform in Scotland”
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Jamie Greene
You get the point that I am making. Of course additional revenues have been achieved through taking a divergent approach to tax, but the net benefit to you guys, who have to give money to your directorates, is nowhere near the levels of money that have been paid by the taxpayer. That brings us back to the issues of fairness and transparency that the report picks up on, which is what I am asking about. Do those tax policies actually result in the amounts of money that you forecast for funding public services? The numbers speak for themselves—they are far from what you forecast.
Public Audit Committee
“Fiscal sustainability and public reform in Scotland”
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Jamie Greene
Do you not think that, after more than 17 years of being in power, this Administration would have learned how to govern and not to have to face such stark criticism from the Auditor General? These are fundamental criticisms of how the Government manages public finances, are they not?
Public Audit Committee
“Fiscal sustainability and public reform in Scotland”
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Jamie Greene
Let us work on the assumption that the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s projections around the cost of the rising public service bill is right—whichever way you model it, is going up. How will that be funded? Will it be funded through additional taxes—that is, through devolved taxation? Is it about maximising your capital borrowing potential? Will it be funded through economic growth and, if so, what do you expect that economic growth to look like? The money has to come from somewhere, and I am still at a loss as to where you think that it is going to come from.
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Let us say that a million miles were driven by combustion engine cars and that was reduced by 20 per cent in the way that the target seems to suggest. It is assumed that that would reduce emissions. That assumption underpins the strategy. However, if we went in the other direction and 1.5 million miles were driven by electric or hybrid cars, instead of a million miles being driven by combustion engine cars, there might still be a reduction in emissions, even though the mileage that was driven by the public would have gone up.
I would have some sympathy if the Government simply dropped the target, provided that it did so for the right reason. If it was trying to reduce emissions and could demonstrate that other policies would achieve the same result, the target in itself would perhaps be irrelevant.
11:00Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Jamie Greene
Realistically, given that we are sitting here in the Parliament, I have to ask which Government in its right mind, particularly coming into an election year, would implement punitive measures such as national charging or road tolls, or start rolling out national measures—rather than doing things at a local level and blaming the councils—by introducing primary legislation that imposes expensive measures on drivers. Surely that would be political suicide for any Government in any jurisdiction. The measures might help to meet the target, but they are very unlikely to happen.
Public Audit Committee
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 26 February 2025
Jamie Greene
I will pick you up on something that was just said, Auditor General. Audit Scotland is calling on the Scottish Government to have a national conversation, but your report says that there has been enough talk and that we need more action, so that call contradicts the essence of your report.
