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 1514 contributions
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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
Everyone wants to know what progress has been made on the issue, whether the public money that has been invested in meeting the policy objective relates to the target, and whether the target is appropriate and necessary relative to the scale of the problem. That is what I am getting at in all of this.
Let us move on to the issue of how we deliver the reduction in mileage, or just usage in general, and the role that other forms of government, particularly local government, can play in that. Has there been any conflict in that regard? Earlier, I got a sense that there might have been some conflict in terms of the Government’s overall national ambition versus the delivery on the ground, much of which is under the control of councils, which have to use their budgets to deliver.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
That is helpful. However, the crux of my question is that Glasgow and Edinburgh have already introduced low-emission zones—I appreciate that they were controversial, and I hope that they are serving their intended purpose—but other measures were afforded to local authorities in the 2019 act. Some of us sat around the table and progressed that legislation—or, indeed, opposed bits of it—so I know that things such as the workplace parking levy and the ability to create boundaries around towns for congestion or pay-as-you-go charges were not introduced. It seems to me that the only measures that local authorities want to be introduced are enhancement of the low-emission zones or another form of pay-as-you-go scheme. What has happened over the past six years that has prevented local authorities from doing that? Why are they going back to the Government and asking for more powers?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
I have a wider question. Why are the councils that want more powers to implement more car reduction measures not using the measures that were afforded to them in the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
I will let you take a break from answering questions, cabinet secretary, as I know that you are finding it tough to speak because you are not well. I will direct my next questions to Transport Scotland.
While I am talking about the target, I want to pick up on some of the statistics, as data is obviously important. In her opening statement, the cabinet secretary talked about 2022 data. The first question is, why is there no data for 2023 or 2024? Is that in production? Also, did the cabinet secretary say that car use or domestic transport accounted for 39 per cent of all transport emissions, and was it cars or domestic transport that accounted for 12.4 per cent of all emissions? Colin Beattie picked up on that point earlier, and I want to be clear on what the numbers are.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
That says to me that the bigger issue is other forms of transport, which are emitting more. What is being done to reduce those emissions?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
How do we balance that with the risk of people perceiving those measures as plugging big holes in council finances, albeit with the right intention? Environmental intentions would be seen as laudable and would garner cross-party support. However, is there a concern that, if the perception is that the money raised from those so-called punitive measures is not ring fenced and is not reinvested in active or sustainable travel or in other improvements to roads or public services, the additional measures that big cities are asking for will raise huge amounts of money that will go into the black hole of local government?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
That is a helpful tone. What do you mean by unnecessary?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
That is very helpful. What engagement have you had with the new UK Government about potential capital funding for transport infrastructure projects in Scotland? What has the response been to any requests?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
I know that she has a sore throat.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Sustainable transport: Reducing car use”
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
I know that, so I will try to spread my questions across the panel. I do have quite a lot of ground to cover, though, and I am afraid that you are first up, cabinet secretary.
I want to take you right back to the beginning of the session, when the convener asked whether you accept not just the report’s recommendations but its content and findings. Turning to paragraph 1 on page 3, which sets out the first of the key messages, I think that the first two sentences are fair in talking about transport as a source of greenhouse gas emissions and the “ambitious” nature of the target in the first place. Just for the record, is there anything else in that paragraph that you agree with? That was very unclear from your first answer. Do you agree with the rest of that paragraph?
