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 772 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 1 October 2024
Jamie Halcro Johnston
The visitor levy is one part of this, but the wider issue is the principle of moving the tax burden away from Scottish Government provision, funded through general taxation, and on to communities, because it is local people and businesses that will be affected. Does that concern you?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 1 October 2024
Jamie Halcro Johnston
I am happy to move on to my next point, unless David Robertson or Malcolm Burr wants to come in.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 1 October 2024
Jamie Halcro Johnston
David, do you have anything to add?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 1 October 2024
Jamie Halcro Johnston
Another concern, which you raise, is about confidence in where that money will be invested. The Highland region is obviously a huge region that has one area where a large part of the population is focused, Inverness, and lots of peripheral communities. A large amount of the tax is likely to be raised in some of those peripheral communities and, from speaking to people in that region, I know that they do not have confidence that that money will go back into those areas or even into the tourism infrastructure. The concern is that the money will just go into local authority revenue. How can those concerns be addressed?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 1 October 2024
Jamie Halcro Johnston
Malcolm Burr will not get off, because my next question is for him. It is quite brief. You talked about the budget being sustained by vacancies. Much of my casework is about people in my region, the Highlands and Islands, not being able to access the full care provision that they have been allocated.
I do not know whether you are able to evaluate the situation—not so much the vacancies for which the council can slow down recruitment or keep open, but things such as care costs that have a direct impact. Can you estimate how much worse the situation would be, or what your budget constraints would be, if you were delivering the services that you should be delivering?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 1 October 2024
Jamie Halcro Johnston
Would you say that the service that you are able to deliver at the moment will be sustainable over the next five, 10 or 15 years?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Proposed National Outcomes
Meeting date: 17 September 2024
Jamie Halcro Johnston
I am not sensing a huge amount of confidence that the Scottish Government is committed to the NPF in delivering on the outcomes. Obviously, it is updating the framework, but I wonder whether there is much point in updating something that it is not going to follow anyway, on principle. With that, I will hand back to the convener.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Proposed National Outcomes
Meeting date: 17 September 2024
Jamie Halcro Johnston
In five years’ time, we will be back here and you will be saying—justifiably—the same things, which is that it is important that the Government, whatever colour of Government it happens to be, needs to look longer term but it is not doing so, and that there needs to be a refocus on that.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Proposed National Outcomes
Meeting date: 17 September 2024
Jamie Halcro Johnston
Do you have anything to add, Lukas?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26
Meeting date: 17 September 2024
Jamie Halcro Johnston
I go back to Heather Williams’s point about silos. In an area such as the Highlands and Islands, if people find it hard to keep their homes warm—indeed, we have some of the highest levels of fuel poverty anywhere in the country—they are, unfortunately, more likely to need NHS services. However, those services are under huge pressure.
You talked about silos, Heather. Even in the health service, primary and secondary care are not really integrating, and as a result, more pressure is being put on, for example, the Scottish Ambulance Service, which is not directly under the control of NHS bosses.
We have talked very generally about public service reform across the country, but is such reform almost more important in rural and island settings than in other areas, simply because fewer choices and alternatives are available?
