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 1306 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, and Social Justice and Social Security Committee (Joint Meeting) [Draft]
Tackling Drug Deaths and Drug Harm
Meeting date: 20 February 2025
Jeremy Balfour
That is helpful. I am conscious of the time, so I do not want to go round every person, but does anybody else have anything to add to that?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Pensioner Poverty
Meeting date: 6 February 2025
Jeremy Balfour
I am conscious that we have only around 10 minutes left. Looking ahead, as we just heard from Debbie Horne, we are going to have a growing number of people of pension age, including some of us around the table, in the next five to 10 years. I am looking for one sentence on this. What—he asked, selfishly—is the one thing that we should be doing now to start safeguarding the system for 10 years’ time? Genuinely, if we are looking ahead to a growing number of older people, what should we do now to protect those people in five to 10 years?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Pensioner Poverty
Meeting date: 6 February 2025
Jeremy Balfour
We cannot do this in five minutes, but it is interesting that, in the past hour and a half, every person has asked for more money for their particular area, and rightly so. The question that we have to grasp, as politicians, is how we pay for all that. At some point, it would be interesting to put the challenge back to those who are asking for the money. Where do we find it? Do we prioritise it over other areas? I appreciate that that topic is not for today, but it is worth noting that, quite rightly, everyone has asked for more money for their area. Where we politicians would find that money is a bigger debate that we need to have, although maybe we will get the answer from Richard Gass.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Pensioner Poverty
Meeting date: 6 February 2025
Jeremy Balfour
Some of this has been covered already, so I would be interested in hearing any new remarks that people might have.
As Adam Stachura and Debbie Horne have pointed out, a substantial number of older people rent—they do not own their accommodation. That comes with its challenges. You have touched on this already, but is there more that we could be doing about that? How do we target help particularly at those who are in rented accommodation?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Pensioner Poverty
Meeting date: 6 February 2025
Jeremy Balfour
I am a bit like Roz McCall’s mum in that I am information technology shy. I also think that most people out there are trying to scam me. I have heard lots of analysis of such problems, but I am still not sure how we can solve them. We all recognise that older people can find using IT or the telephone difficult. Age Scotland’s helpline will help with that. However, I am still struggling a wee bit with what local government and the third sector could do to engage with a group of people who do not like IT. There will not be a magic wand, but what steps could we take to make that easier?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Framework Legislation and Henry VIII Powers
Meeting date: 28 January 2025
Jeremy Balfour
Would you accept that, with the exception of this committee, secondary legislation is less well scrutinised than proposed primary legislation?
11:00Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Framework Legislation and Henry VIII Powers
Meeting date: 28 January 2025
Jeremy Balfour
On the amount of secondary legislation, your thesis or argument is that there is not substantially more than there was 26 years ago. Do you not recognise that Covid and Brexit led to an increase in secondary legislation? That was absolutely justifiable, but they led to an increase.
We have also heard evidence that the Government has changed in the past 26 years. Rightly or wrongly, we live at a faster pace. We are all driven by social media, and decisions are made on that basis. That is a legitimate reason why there is more secondary legislation. Do you not accept that in any way at all?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Framework Legislation and Henry VIII Powers
Meeting date: 28 January 2025
Jeremy Balfour
I return to your point about parliamentary time. Primary legislation does not come to the chamber on a weekly basis. We spend a lot of time debating important topics, but that is not legislation. The issue has to do with our approach to stage 1—we understand that. However, when we scrutinise bills, is the pressure on committees rather than on the whole chamber? My gut feeling is that we do a stage 3 no more than every six or eight weeks. That does not seem to be a lot of pressure on Parliament itself. There might be pressure on ministers and behind the scenes but, for Parliament, that deeper scrutiny is not a pressure on time, is it?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Framework Legislation and Henry VIII Powers
Meeting date: 28 January 2025
Jeremy Balfour
You are not going to like this suggestion, minister, but, in the future, if there have been substantial changes to a bill through amendments, should there be scope between stages 2 and 3 for the committee to take more evidence from key stakeholders, before stage 3 amendments are considered? That would be up to the convener, but should it be in their mind that, if there has been a substantial change to a bill, that could be examined before stage 3?
Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee
Framework Legislation and Henry VIII Powers
Meeting date: 28 January 2025
Jeremy Balfour
That is helpful.
When a bill team and the minister sit down to consider a piece of proposed legislation, how do they decide whether everything will be in the bill or whether to leave a lot more to secondary legislation? Is that a conscious decision? Is it something that your colleagues or those advising them think about, or does it just emerge as the process goes on?
